TOW #14: Pastor T's Penultimate Sermon (Written Text)

On her penultimate Sunday at our church, our pastor of more than ten years gave her sermon on the journey through life. It ties to the occasion given that she is entering a new stage of her own life (retirement), and the church is entering a new stage of its existence (searching for a new pastor). She seeks to aid us in the new leg of our journey with the reassurance that God has always provided instructions.

The most important rhetorical strategy she uses is beginning the sermon with an anecdote in which she describes her recent travel on an airplane. Humorously, she tells the story of how she paid an excessive amount to check her luggage when she could have red-tagged her bags for free and carried them herself to the next connecting flight. “Here’s the kicker,” she says, “ at the end of the trip, doing it this way, you don’t have to go to baggage claim and wait till your luggage comes spinning around on that ramp, then fight off rude people who hog the spaces next to the thing, so you have to say, ‘Excuse me can I get my bag,’ and there goes your bag for another trip around.” She knows the image of a pastor fighting off a self-important crowd of vacationers at a baggage claim is sure to humanize her. Oftentimes preachers are seen as stuffy or more pure in their thoughts than any other person. By presenting herself as a true human being who experiences the same baggage claim annoyances as everyone else, she makes her audience much more open to receiving her sermon as a lesson they can apply to their own lives, rather than just to the life of someone of elite moral character. 

This strategy is probably most effective in the present world, in which the new generations are moving away from the church. It appeals to emotion through humor rather than fear, as has been used by preachers of the past, which is significantly less intimidating. After such an introduction, when she says that God is not like an airline and provides fairly detailed instructions, her audience will be prepared to hear her out.

TOW #13: Facial Blindness (Written Text)

Facial recognition is a skill most of us have had since birth, a skill, given its commonplace nature, that we often take for granted. However, for some, this ability would seem completely foreign. Kate Szell, a former partner in a law firm, recently won a science writing contest on the subject of prosopagnosia, a condition that makes it extremely difficult for a person to recognize faces. She aims to spread awareness and foster an environment of understanding for those suffering from the condition.

As even our smartphones are learning to recognize faces, it is difficult to imagine a world without such an ability. That’s why Szell, in her piece, rather than overburdening her audience with scientific terms, offers an analogy so that they might understand how it feels to suffer from prosopagnosia. She suggests to her audience to try recognizing people by their hands rather than their faces (paragraph 2). Through this, it becomes easy for a reader to perceive the difficulty. If faces appeared as similar to us as hands, it would certainly be tough to differentiate between people.

To compound the level of understanding obtained through the analogy, Szell also offers insight from a person who suffers from the condition. A fourteen-year-old girl tells about how she once asked her best friend of many years who she was. “[S]he’d had a haircut, so how was I to know?” (paragraph 1). The testimony gives her credibility on a personal level and makes her reader feel sympathy for those suffering from prosopagnosia. A simple level of emotional connection to a real case of the condition facilitates the level of acceptance and patience Szell hopes to achieve.

Beyond personal testimony, Szell provides the logical appeal through facts she has collected and expert testimony to the reality of the issue. According to studies, she writes, around two percent of the population has prosopagnosia (paragraph 3). While the percentage seems small, it is not. Out of every fifty people, one has prosopagnosia. Such as statistic helps her audience to see how vital understanding is. Most people interact with at least fifty people in their lives, so awareness of the condition should be much more widespread than it is. As she, a former partner in a law firm, is not an expert in the subject, she references professionals to give her cause credibility as well. Researcher Kirsten Dalrymple from the University of Minnesota makes known that in her studies, while some children with the condition cope with their condition, others become withdrawn. Some cannot differentiate between friends and strangers and put themselves at risk (paragraph 4). Through Dalrymple, Szell thus indicates the importance of awareness for parents, teachers, and other children.

Kate Szell’s contest-winning essay certainly takes the prize for helping people to, in her own words, “recognize the face of prosopagnosia” (paragraph 10).

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/23/faceblindness-prosopagnosia-kate-szell-wellcome-trust-science-writing-prize-face-blindness

TOW #12: The American Patriot's Handbook (IRB #2, Part 1)

Recently I have been reading The American Patriot’s Handbook, a compilation of American historical documents arranged by George Grant. Grant is a proud patriot and a pastor at the Parish Presbyterian Church in Tennessee. Thus, I made the prediction before reading that the documents he compiled would be largely positive about America’s history, and that they would reflect the progression of American religious views. His purpose would then be to guide Americans to be proud of their country.

So far, the documents have reflected the ideas I predicted they would. One way Grant ensures that his audience will get the message he aims for them to receive is through giving each document a brief description, in which he often applies logical reasons as to why America is great. For example, in his description of The Mayflower Contract , he strategically places one significant line immediately before the document: “Thus the Pilgrim Fathers had anticipated the covenantal social contract seventy years before John Locke and 140 years before Jean Jacques Rousseau” (7). This asserts to the reader, through apparent fact or logical evidence, that Americans had developed the social contract theory before the Old World, thus making Americans superior. Though that last claim seems far-fetched, in the fleeting moment after reading the statement, there is some American pride evoked that makes one glad to be American rather than European. It is thus significant that this is immediately followed by the text itself. The last idea an American has before reading the document is that it had made them better, more democratic, more socially intellectual, than Europe.

Another way Grant ensures that his purpose is achieved is through his own descriptions of significant American figures. For about sixty pages, there are no documents, but rather descriptions of Americans written by Grant himself. The texts are factual, giving Grant support through rationality as to why one should be proud to be an American without ever directly stating it. However, he derives his support only from selected evidence, carefully omitting any fact that would break his logos. For example, in his description of John Jay, he hails the Jay treaty as having helped to “avert a renewal of hostilities with Britain” (156), but fails to acknowledge that the treaty was sabotaged by another founder, Alexander Hamilton, and that the treaty consisted predominantly of sly promises from Britain, such as that they would pay for recent impressments of Americans, but said nothing of future impressment. Such evidence would undermine presentation of early American strength.

For any American audience that is somewhat uninformed about the ins and outs of American history, Grant is likely successful in increasing their patriotism.