week2o

Chapter six in the Kent book also talks a lot about using ethos, pathos and logos in your writing. Ethos is a rhetorical device that appeals to the audience by proving the credibility of the author. When people are able to trust the author the can become more easily persuaded by them. Pathos is a rhetorical device that appeals to the audiences' emotions. When the author uses stories and examples that the reader is passionate about or has an emotional connection with they are more likely to be persuaded. The other rhetorical device Kent talks about is logos. Logos is appealing to the audience by using true facts and statistics. This makes the audience more easily persuaded because it shows the author is knowledgeable in the subject.

These three different strategies to persuasion are very important and I can see how this is so because I've learned about them since I was a junior in high school studying for my English AP test. There are examples of them everywhere; in a speech, a debate or in writing.

Social media is also an important thing that uses these three things to persuade. Blogging has become a very popular way for people to give out or receive information. In a website I found they list the top 15 most popular blogs. http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/blogs

-Some of the blogs that are included in this are; The Huffington Post, Gawker and Fanhouse. These blogs use logos in their news stories by showing dates, times and statistics of the different newsworthy events they are writing about. They use ethos by being a well known online newspapers or sports sites that people have been reading for years. The information they write about is correct and people want to read correct information. They also use pathos when writing some of their stories. The journalists for these blogs know how to appeal to the audiences emotions in stories that people are passionate about.

-There are also other blogs such as; TMZ and Perez Hilton. These blogs are social media blogs that talk about famous people and all the drama behind them. Even though these blogs aren't as newsworthy as the other ones, they still use rhetorical devices. TMZ is a trusted celebrity site that does a great job with using ethos. There are a lot of fake celebrity gossip magazines and websites, but TMZ is known for being correct and factual. Perez Hilton always speaks his mind and his blog is more opinion than facts, but he uses pathos by getting the audiences' attention and making them interested in the subjects he's talking about.

Rhetorical devices are an important part of social media and every day speech.

Week2

Logical fallacies are an essential part of persuasive speech and creating arguments. In Kent chapter 6 he explains all of the different types of logical fallacies. There are quite a few logical fallacies and some of them are similar, but all of them are not ethical ways to present an argument.

In a website http://www.logicalfallacies.info/ , they explain that the ability to identify logical fallacies in the arguments of others, and to avoid them in one’s own arguments, is both valuable and increasingly rare. Fallacious reasoning keeps us from knowing the truth, and the inability to think critically makes us vulnerable to manipulation by those skilled in the art of rhetoric.
This website explains more in depth what logical fallacies are, and some people use them in different types of speech.

I see a lot of these logical fallacies every day in advertisements and people's speech. In the vote or die campaign they were using argumentum ad baculum. Most car comercials use argumentum ad novitam to say that their car is bigger and better than the others. One of the most common fallacies I see are the Bandwagon fallacies. When advertisments use professional athletes or famous actors to sell their products they are doing this. They are trying to send a message that because these famous people use the product everyone else should as well.

Logical fallacies are a confusing concept for me to understand. I know they are bad and we shouldn't normally use them because it is unethical, but it's weird because they surround us in our every day life. They aren't always bad because using them to convince people to support a cause could be a good thing, it's just bad because they are very misleading.

Week1o

Chapter three of the Kent book really explains the importance of editing and proofreading. This chapter tells you what tense to speak in, how important it is to speak correctly, why you should use a style book and how to use proofreading marks.

Learning all of these things aren't only good for your classes or your profession they are also good knowledge to have right now while you are using social media. Now days with all of the social media being used anyone can look up information about you any way they want to. They can look to Facebook, MySpace and Blogs to see personal information about you. This can be a really good thing or a really bad thing, depending on your knowledge of grammar and spelling.

When employers are looking to hire someone they typically are able to look up the person's Facebook or whatever. This is why you need to make sure it's cleaned up. When using Facebook or just blogging on a website you need to make sure your grammar is correct. This is a way that employers can see how your write. If they don't have a sample of your work or want a more in depth sample they can Google your name online.

If you aren't practicing these simple little tasks on your social media websites then it could harm you in the long run. You could end up looking like you don't know your information you learned from school and your AP books, even though you really do.

This is why I like to practice correct grammar no matter what I'm writing for. You never know who is watching and judging you.

Week1

The importance of Editing and proofreading.

I never realized the importance of this so much until this past summer. I always knew I had to know this stuff and make sure I had it down for my classes. My writing for mass media class tested us over this, which I liked because it made me study it. I knew it would be hard to study such a large book of spelling and grammar if it wasn't required for me. This is why I studied it really really hard. I went threw almost the whole AP book. I think I figured it out pretty well, but then I went a summer without studying it and I forgot almost all of it.

During my internship with Box Talent this summer I thought it almost was a joke. I had to answer phones and sort out the mail... all the little stuff. Every now and then I would get a bigger task such as communicating with a client about a band they were trying to book or something like that. All of the sudden, one day an agent was writing a promotional letter to send out to potential clients. She wrote it and was ready to send it out, but then turned to me and asked me to proof read it. I was so scared that I would forget something or correct something that really didn't need to be corrected.

After looking over her paper for awhile I realized that I was able to correct a few things for her and I knew they were correct due to the knowledge I had with the AP Style Book. She didn't just ask me to proof read her letter because she wanted some random person to read it, she asked me because she knew I was a college Public Relations major and I had been practicing writing correctly for a couple of years. I really felt proud of myself after I did this and I knew she was impressed with me because of the great corrections I made for her!

PR Writing

Hello I'm Jessica Prater and this is my blog :) This is the second week of my PR Writing class. I think I will enjoy this class a lot since I will get experience in what writing in the PR world is like. I will be very busy with this class, but I know I'm going to try my hardest to succeed. Can't wait to start my regular class blogging!! :)