Blog #9&10

Thorough out this semester I have learned many things. Our class have also read many texts. If I didn't have this class I wouldn't have learned much about what going on around me and in everyday life. Everything that we have read is important to me in some way but, there are some that were more important then others. The very first text we read was very important to me. It was Foss, he explained what rhetoric is and how it is used. If I didn't read this text I wouldn't truly understand rhetoric and that's what our entire class is based around. Two other texts that I believe were important was Goffman and Pollan. Goffman was important because he showed me things I would have never noticed in commericals or advertisements. You can relate almost anything to Goffman, from the way people stand and hold things and they way they are posing in the advertisements means something. I would have never realized there was any signifigance in that if it weren't for Goffman. My last choice of Pollan changed my whole perspective on eating. When I began reading this novel I thought it was going to be the most boring thing I have ever read. As I got further into the book my opinion changed it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I learned a lot about the food I eat everyday. Some of the things I found out I would have rathered not knowing about. I could never look at a hamburger the same again or a piece of chicken. But it was very interesting and important for me to actually know what's going on with the food I'm eating everyday.
Everything I learned this semester I will take with me and use it for the rest of my life. I never even heard of the word rhetoric until this class. Now I can't believe I never knew it, it's everywhere. I see it in articles hear it in lectures, it's even used when having conversation. Basically everything we do involves some sort of rhetoric and I would have had no idea if it was for Foss explaining it and for this class. Even Function Ranking and the feminine touch I never heard of any of those things and they are in my everyday life, they are in every ad or commericial I see. It was never a big deal before but now I know that their is importance to what they are trying to do when they use Goffmans techniques. I learned a lot of imortant things just from those two texts. Pollan also taught me a lot about what really goes on with food and food is essential to our lives, we can't live without it. It's good to know the truth. It's also nice to have a better understanding of things I never knew existed until now.