A Rhetorical Appeal to Stop Desertification

One of my tasks in my MOOC on Rhetorical Writing on Coursera this week was to watch ten minutes of the this video and post my analysis. It was a good exercise.



 In his speech on desertification, the rhetorical appeal Savory uses most successfully is logos. His logical argument stands firm on a claim, a reason, and an unstated assumption.

He claims that the “most perfect storm\tsunami” is “bearing upon” humankind who is facing a grim reality in which the world is getting hotter due to climate change that is being caused, among other factors, by desertification. He makes his point by showing evidence via images of before and after coupled with anecdotes collected through his vast experience as a scientist and researcher in the field.According to his argument, the reason why we should something about this problem, is because we are directly affected by it once we are also victims of climate change. Finally, his unstated assumption is that we are on the verge of disaster and that our civilization will perish (just like the Mayans as many others) if we do not find a way of reversing desertification.

His appeal is also logically strong because it is well supported by statistics, causal statements, and relevant examples.His statistics’ citations include the percentage of Earth (about two thirds) that is turning to desert and the amount of rain fall in Yemen and the fate of that water. His causal statements depict how land that was once covered by vegetation becomes desert. He also shows how livestock plays an important role in preventing desertification from happening.

Finally, he shares evidence that shows that, contrary to what many believe, it is large herds moving, grazing, and trampling the soil that makes vegetation come back and thus prevent desertification. Therefore, we should consider having large herds of livestock roaming in the land if we are to stop this disaster. Last but not least, I should say that the strength of his argument lies in the fact that he does not only appeal to logic, but also to ethos (his vast knowledge on the field), to pathos (his tone of voice and the life changing effect of his experience with elephants in Africa), and to kairos (he speaks at the right time, in the right place, and for the right audience).

Other Writers and I

                                               photo credit: Βethan via photopin cc

As I sat at my desk this morning staring at my computer screen, I was convinced one more time that I was not a born writer. In so many ways life has taught me that we have to fight many battles. So, as I crusade against the keyboard and a torrent of ideas for this essay, I was assaulted by the daemons of my fears and insecurities and many times I had the desire to take the road back to the couch and watch TV instead of writing. However, just as a farmer knows he has to plow the land if he wants to harvest something, I said to myself that if I had to engage the enemy in myself, I had to attack the dragon, rescue the princess of my self-esteem and write. Isn’t the creative process like this for everyone? Isn’t life a battle of some sort for every human being?

Growing up in a developing country is not easy and learning to write depicts it quite well. In this manner, after clashing with many other possible titles, I kept the one I had chosen for my second assignment: ”a struggling writer.” I grew up the rural area of Midwestern Brazil in a poor peasant family. Therefore, as I scavenged the archives looking for stories, I came across three narratives of struggle that resonated with me and helped me paint a portrait of my adventures with writing and education in general. The first was "White Trash Writer" by Lucinda Eby, the second "I Am an Apprehensive Writer and Blogger" by Nancy O'Kelly, and the third "My mother, My Abuser, My Inspiration" by Alison Guynes. These three stories inspired me in different ways and I will try to weave them into my saga as a writer in the lines below.

Lucinda Eby tells us in her wonderful narrative that she was raised in a “book culture.” Finding out that her father, who had another family and was an absent parent, used to come once in while with a truckload of books, made me a bit envious because I wished I had been given more books as a child. Had I had half of the books she had, would I have become a bit better with words, a better writer? I wonder. Although my father was always loving and present, this story of scarcity unites us in some way because despite the absence of books, I grew up in a sort of “educational culture” and that was “one of the pieces of luck I had.” Our family kept moving from farm to farm and my parents would only accept to work in a place that had a school nearby. Nearby, many times, meant a two-hour walk to a place in the middle of nowhere with only one instructor to teach reading and writing to about thirty kids ranging from first to fourth grade crammed into a single room. Consequently, I grew up walking to school and learned to value every step of the way. Looking back now, I guess my parents’ passion for learning was in so many ways what saved me and my four siblings not only from poverty, but from ignorance.

Therefore, as I journeyed through elementary and middle school I was mostly a reader who incorporated stories into my dreams and nightmares. In high school, my penmanship made a debut in writing book reports and compositions in which I started expressing some of my own ideas and discovered I had a voice. I once managed to craft four different versions of the same book to help some classmates that were too lazy to read or just did not know how to do it. It was in a sense that hint of invention and trickery that made me suspect that there might be some hidden happiness, a lost treasure, in writing. A fascination with words was taking me over. That was when I developed an interest for song lyrics and was mesmerized by the way musicians played with words, the poetry within songs overwhelmed me. Inspired by the beauty of song lyrics, I made some attempts at writing poetry that I compiled in a little notebook of poems I used to read to my teenage peers.

As I grew older and prepared to enter college, the door of poetry shut as the curtains of academic writing opened in front of my eyes. I came across the mandatory composition prep course that culminated with the life and death challenge of a test. Such an exam was a turning point in my life because my choice of topic for the college entrance composition (dreams) made me a psychologist instead of a journalist. Maybe I just wanted to escape writing somehow. Can we escape fate? I ask. It seems we really cannot escape destiny. When I ran away from writing about social injustice and escaped being a journalist, I fell into the trap of being a psychology major who in the first semester just felt hypnotized by the writings of Sigmund Freud (the first one I read, The Interpretation of Dreams) and realized that a great deal of psychologist work is that of writer whose narrative that requires fine writing skills.

Different from Lucinda Eby, who says her English composition classes were not very helpful, I owe a lot to my academic experience with writing once it poured content\ideas into my soul. As a psychology undergraduate student, I read a lot of books about psychology and psychoanalysis. These readings taught me the importance of considering an audience and once again helped me develop my voice. As far as writing is concerned, I don’t think I wrote anything worth remembering as an undergrad. However, in my master’s degree I was coached in writing and learned, among other things, that one needs commas for breathing and that writing drafts and revising them as much as possible helps a lot in the composing process. Due to this coaching, I was always able to complete my assignments and that made me feel proud of what I had done.

Not a born, but a runaway writer, I became a blogger and an apprehensive essayist just like Nancy. Similar to her, I sometimes feel paralyzed in front of a writing task because I also "question every word, every sentence." Just like Nancy, when crafting blog posts, I fight battles all the time to compose a bit more than snippets. Nonetheless, a little different from Nancy, I do revise what I post despite feeling also “nervous and afraid” whenever I face a writing task. The psychologist in me reminds me that anxiety when facing a challenge is expected. If writing is such a struggle, why do I insist on doing it? Why did I enroll in this course?  

Wrapping up my chronicle as a learner and a writer and reflecting on why I keep fighting this battle, I guess I can relate with Alison Guynes’ narrative. She tells us that she started reading as a cloak to escape her bipolar, abusive mother’s fits of rage. I read and study as a shield against a government that does not invest in education, a way of escaping ignorance. However, Alison goes on to tell us that her camouflage was lifted when her mother told her to write her a story because she sure had something in her “useless little head”. Her first story was a success and she wrote many more and that did not only change her mother’s mood, but made of her a fan of her writing and a friend. So, thinking about why writing is so important to me, I guess that with my blogs I try to share some of the things I have my “useful little head” with my peers. Like a child that vows to conquer his mother’s love, I try to conquer some fans and friends through writing. Composing seems to emerge from the compulsion to tell stories, teach something to my peers, and unfold the creative process within my soul. The act of composing is a process of discovery in which I reveal and hide many aspects of myself. It is a chance to contemplate my multiple identities, my many possibilities. My camouflage is lifted and put back every line, every time I copy, cut, and paste. Writing allows me to deal with my fears and reinvent myself to keep fighting the daily battles within my soul.

What kind of writer am I?

 

                                         photo credit: bitzi ☂ ion-bogdan dumitrescu via photopin cc

This is an assignment for a course I am taking at Coursera called Writing II: Rhetorical Composing. The first task was to introduce myself answering the question on what kind of writer I was. Here is what I wrote:

First I should say that I was delighted with this task. I always tend to write too much in these “getting to know” you posts. They are always part of online courses and generally very informal, for this reason people tend to write the least they can to avoid overwhelming participants with too much to read. This one, it seems it is required to write a bit more. So, I am not going to feel guilty for writing more than I should. So, here I go.

I guess my introduction partially answers the question about what kind of writer I am. I am a struggling writer who just loves doing it. This love for writing is a newfound love though. I call it new because I love the craft, but I still feel like a beginner since the very act of writing itself is a struggle for me. I also see it as a recent passion due to the fact that it has not always been this intense. In the following paragraphs I will tell you the story of how it all began.

As an undergraduate student in psychology in Brazil and a graduate student in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) in Oklahoma City University City in The U.S.A., I just went through the motions in writing. Although, looking back, I think I already liked it, I saw it as just an assignment. The papers I wrote at the time were for grade and only a requirement to be filed and a form to be filled out. This formal education also gave me a chance to learn something about writing. I remember that when I was getting my master’s I always had a coach (a native speaker) to proofread my work and have always received good tips on how to write a better essay or research paper. One of my professors on some occasions complimented me on how I had progressed as a writer throughout the course. I was glad and flattered by his remarks, but I saw that as a task that had been done and writing as something I would be done with by the end of the course.

 In 2006 I participated in a workshop and was introduced to a new world: web 2.0 and the world of blogging. This new world was what forced to start writing for a different purpose and for a new audience, and as a consequence, forced me to see that I was not done with writing just yet. Now I was not being graded anymore and I was not writing for my professors, but for everyone on web that happened to come across one of my blog posts. It is funny to see now how my idea of what an audience was has changed over the years. At the beginning of my blogging journey, my immediate audience was my students. I wrote posts for them and expected them to react to what I wrote.

After some time, maybe due to my lack of training in the art of writing and also for practical and pedagogical reasons, I started finding that (writing posts myself and asking students to comment) a real drag to my students. I then handled the duty of writing to them. It was a blossoming garden of composing: all my students started blogging. I was delighted to discover how creative they were. They illustrated their posts with their own drawings and I commented on them and also asked them to comment on their peers’ posts. At that time the audience was my students and the purpose was to get them to react to what their peers had written. Therefore, I did not realize I was a bad writer and did not feel the need to start doing it myself.

Fast forward about four years and due to my involvement in professional development and my presence in the blogosphere, I started feeling compelled to take writing a bit more seriously. I had now started writing reflection posts about the things I was doing and how much I was learning. I had a need to start sharing my experiences. That was when I saw that my audience was no longer just my students but educators who were a bit more demanding concerning the quality of what they read. That was when the struggling writer emerged.

When I started writing as an educator, I realized I had a lot to learn about it. From that moment on, I noticed it was hard work to come up with something that went beyond a simple paragraph. I really have some basic doubts on where to place a comma. English, not being my first language, was also another problem because it was always so difficult for me to find the right word. I gave up posting to my blogs many times. Other times it just took me weeks to finish a post and finally add it to my blog. I tried to set a posting schedule and deadlines for writing, but it proved ineffective as a means of making me a more prolific and competent writer. It seemed that writing was not for me.

When I was about to give up, I had an idea and thought to myself that a book about writing would be a good idea. I said to myself “There should be a book with a recipe on how to write a good essay, a good blog post.”  It was with that in mind that I bought the book On Writing Well by William Zinsser. To my disappointment, I discovered that there is not a recipe for writing this or that kind of thing. My problems were far from being over. Nonetheless, this same author showed me that there was light at the end of the tunnel. I discovered through reading (and I already knew it from my own experience) that writing is difficult for everyone and that is something that, like so many other things, is learned by doing. It was about the time I was reading this book that I decided to enroll in this course and here I am. So, my name is José Antonio da Silva (my online friends call me JA), a Brazilian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher in Brasilia, and I am a struggling writer. It is really nice to meet you all and be able to battle the monster of writing together.