The pre-writing practices from my high school and middle school days mostly included a detailed diagram of where we wanted our papers to go, what kind of conclusions we wanted to make, which quotes to use, etc. My sophomore year of high school we had a pretty rigorous set of instructions we had to follow before we were even allowed to go ahead and start writing the actual essay itself (and each part of the process was graded). I do appreciate this method (now, not back then) because laying out the skeleton for the paper, all the way down to which quotes we wanted to include in which paragraph made writing papers a pretty easy process. I still continue to diagram my papers because all too often I have found myself trying to write an essay that turns into me staring blankly at my computer screen until I just give up and work on something else.
Junior year of high school, when I did my term paper, it was required to put everything on notecards. I'm not the biggest fan of this process because I tend to be fairly unorganized when it comes to keeping a bunch of 3X5 cards together, but at the time it was effective in keeping things together to write a 12 page paper.
Nowadays, I like bouncing ideas off of fellow English majors to get feedback on whether or not I actually have something I can elaborate on or if it's just wild, unfounded speculation. I think it's beneficial to be in a room filled with creative minds to get a good start to writing a paper.
Now, on to my question about the Gorgias reading...
"All who have and do persuade people of things do so by molding a false argument (11)."
Based on this line alone from the reading, is all persuasion inherently bad? Is persuasion ever justified for the greater good of a community or does it always have selfish roots for trying to get a person/people to believe the same thing as the persuader?
I agree. Writing is a communal process. I think those old ways were meant to be out-grown.
ReplyDeletePersuasion is based on the root of what the persuader feels. That emotion is the driving force, and the selfish roots only derive from that passion the person feels. People are blind to the issues their argument may have because they feel the benefits out way the costs. If something is good or bad for the community, it depends on your perspective of how that relates to the issues at hand.
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