Proposition 8

Yesterday, we got to work in class on our research papers. I had picked out teenage pregnancies in the beginning because I thought it would be a very informative paper, and it was something I didn't know much about but wanted to learn.  Before going into class yesterday, though, I had tried to find research on this including statistics from the U.S. on the number of pregnant girls and surprisingly, it was very hard to find. So... after talking to Deanna, I decided to switch my research topic to the new Proposition 8 bill that was recently passed in California - which bans gays from being married and also nulls the marriages licenses given out previous years. This is a HUGE controversy right now, and would be great to learn more about!!

Beautiful Bodies

Chapter ten is all about body rhetoric and what our bodies do not only to our self image but also to what others think about us from first glance.  The chapter ranges from things such as tattoos to how we portray "beauty" from advertisements.  Throughout chapter ten there are ranges of article and stories all about these topics and how we are affected by what image we think we should convey with our bodies.  

One of the first articles is titled "Fat Is an Advertising Issue" by Susie Orbach and I find it to be a very informative and influential article.  Basically, the author is describing how Dove takes a "'real' woman's image" approach in their advertisements so that women aren't compelled to think that they have to look like skinny, beautiful, supermodels in order to use the product.  This is a great tactic! I, personally, find myself looking at ads wondering how I could make myself look like the skinny, perfectly tone women in each ad that I come across. I feel like I could never use the product (for instance if it's clothes - I could never wear the clothes and look as good in them) like they do, so I'm turned off from buying it.  

Taking Dove's approach, if I were to see a girl who had my amount of body fat and weight in an ad, I'd most likely connect with her more and therefore be impelled to buy whatever she was advertising.  I commend Dove for their idea and Ms. Orbach for supporting the whole thing. 

Beauty, as cliche as it sounds, is on the inside; anyone can look the same on the outside. 

Lovely research

To be honest, I am not a big fan of research. I learn a lot when I actually complete my research, but the process isn't something I'd choose to do on a Friday night, or any other night given.  The research I completed for teen pregnancy was actually interesting.  It's quite a surprise to see how many teens in the world are pregnant, and also how common it is among some cultures!

I found it easy to find books about teen pregnancy and what should be done if that happens, but I never found a book that actually gave me statistics about how common it used to be compared to today's society. Websites were easier to mull through for that information.  Magazine articles, I found, are pretty much impossible to find about this topic.

Bibliography's (works cited pages) are easy enough to get the hang of; they don't trouble me very much.

Teenage Pregnancy

The first on my list of possible research topics is teenage pregnancies.  I feel that as I've grown up, this has become a bigger and surprisingly less of a "no-no" topic than it used to be, especially in America.  In high school at my graduation, I counted eight - yes EIGHT! - girls in a class of 230 students that were pregnant and walking across stage. This isn't counting the two that I knew of that were out due to their pregnancies.  That's way too much!  I guess the shock has worn off among some of society as seeing this in teenagers but for me, I am still not sure exactly how I feel about the thought of someone my age being a mother.  Is it wrong and hindering or is it something that I should accept and cope with on my own time?

When an adult, married woman is with child, everyone can't seem to coo and congratulate her enough on her expected child, but when my friend got pregnant in high school, she didn't get the same congratulations, well at least not by everyone. Even though some of our society is changing the way they look at teenagers that are pregnant, there are others who still would disown you if you were their own family.  My friend that was pregnant was among those who wouldn't be looked at again if they were unveiled as being unclean or unpure, so she, without telling many others than myself, went to an abortion agency and had things "dealt with". 

She wasn't the only one of my friends to get pregnant in high school... another was pregnant our senior year.  This paper isn't about abortions though, so I'm not going into the controversy about that, it just goes to show that the pressures of the world are sometimes at east, but depending what values and morals your family has been brought up on, being pregnant will have its different pressures.  

There are many countries in our world where being a pregnant teenager is normal to them.  When the women don't have college to go to after high school, it isn't out of the ordinary to see pregnant girls walking among the rest of society in the masses.

Going back to my first paragraph, wondering how acceptable this situation is really becoming, and thought just popped into my head and I wonder, is America actually more lenient about this topic than I let on?  I just remembered that a new popular TV series that just came onto the family safe channel of HBO is called The Secret Life of an American Teenager where the main character is pregnant.  If this can be openly shown to families across America with children that watch and learn most of what they base life off of on the TV, then there's obviously some acceptance for the situation.  Are people finally coming out and saying, "It's okay"?

Is it really okay?  What should our views be on the topic of teenage pregnancies?  I want to compare America and its moral values along with the opportunities girls are allotted here on the free land with the rest of the world and figure out what's different and what's changing.

Learn How to Edit

I loved the new ways of editing that Deanna told us to use in class today. Honestly, whenever I edit a paper, all I do is read and re-read looking for the same kinds of mistakes over and over. When we sat with our partners I got more editing in than I could ever have done on my own. Elizabeth helped me so much by telling me what didn't make sense and what sentences I should change or fix.  We spent about thirty minutes on each other's papers but in the end, our papers argued the points we were trying to argue much more effectively.

I didn't get around to trying the two other editing techniques, but I will before Tuesday.

Thank You for Smoking

This was my first time watching this movie and I have to admit, I wasn't that fond of it. It just didn't appeal to me in any way.  I did find a few appeals to pathos and other visual rhetoric examples in the movie, though.

When the "opposed to cigarette" guys were talking on the TV show at the beginning of the movie, the character representing their company definitely went the appeal to pathos route by using a teenaged victim of cigarette usage.  He was a younger guy who already had cancer, and was obviously being treated for the cancer by the lack of hair on his body.  The representative for the company finished his argument by saying, "He no longer thinks cigarettes are cool."  By saying this, people who are watching the guy on TV and then hear this can visually relate what cigarettes are capable of and will hopefully end up disliking them.

"If your parents told you chocolate was dangerous, would you not try it? Then maybe you should try cigarettes for yourself too." - Nick Nader.  This question made me chuckle a little to myself because in some ways he's right; kids do the opposite of what their parents try to make them do. If my mom told me that I wasn't allowed to have chocolate, I'd probably still eat it. The fact is, though, the kids just need to be smart enough not to try cigarettes without being told. Education. That's all that is needed. 

The whole thing about arguments made me think for a while also.  "If you argue correctly then you're never wrong." "It wasn't a negotiation; it was an argument."  I have always thought that arguments were just heated negotiations, but I've never really thought about it before.  If you're going to argue a topic, I guess you'd need to know what you're talking about, making the first  quote true; you wouldn't be wrong, at least in your own opinion. That leads into the second quote proving that he wasn't negotiating with his mom about going to California; Joey was arguing, pretty much just telling her that he was going with Nick on the business trip.

All-in-all it was a good, informative example of visual rhetoric but not a film that I would choose to watch at home.

Visual Rhetoric Image

This image that I have chosen definitely is trying to persuade the audience of something.  The author of this particular image is trying to persuade smokers to quit while they still have time.  The author of this image uses a great appeal of pathos with the shocking yet humorous view of the guy's mouth on the fume pipe.  It's a shocking wakening that the mouth of a smoker is as disgusting and unhealthy as the fume pipe on a bus.  The author is someone obviously that deals with health related topics, especially focusing on diseases caused by smoking.  The audience is obviously focused at being the people in the society who are smokers and even more, heavy smokers.  To me, this image is rather effective because it gives a visual image as to what smoking really does to those who do it.  It doesn't give off a visual as being something healthy and good for a person to do, so I believe that this ad would help reduce the number of smokers in society.