Opinion Piece

My opinion piece is about the health care reform for the N.F.L. Specifically what grabbed my attention when i chose this piece is that its about sports. i love sports and i enjoy reading and watching and hearing about them. This is the main reason why i picked the article. I think the reason why we are attracted to some articles more than others is the way we were raised. If you were raised with parents who love sports, your probably more likely to have a biased opinion about sports rather than someone who's parents raised them on religion, or schooling, or anything for that matter.

I liked my opinion pieces' rhetoric because the author, Stefan Fatsis, gives an ethos point of view in one of his paragraphs. He actually got to play for the Denver Broncos for a while so that he could write a book about it. Something i didn't really like rhetorically was that the actual formating of the paper seemed a little bit off or weird to me. I haven't seen any paper written the way Stefan wrote his, so it threw me off a little bit. Other than that the piece was an excellent one, at least in my opinion.

The Forever Long Search

It was really hard for me to find a good opinion paper. I wanted to write about something that was interesting to me. I have found that I write a lot better if I am interested in what I am writing about. I searched everywhere for days trying to find something that I could stand maybe writing about. I eventually found something. It wasn't what I was hoping for but the paper is well written. The writer seemed to have a hard time writing it though because she was trying to put too much into her paper. The ideas she had were good enough but it seemed to kind of be all over the place at times. But as a whole I think I can make the paper work to my advantage and turn it into something good. Hopefully. I am still working on it sad to say.

The paper I am writing about talks about things people worry about when they don't really make up that much of a percentage. If you look at it as a whole the deaths caused from animals isn't even comparable to those caused by suicide or even disease. I think the author makes a good point on this. We should be more worried about disease that is one of the top leading causes of death compared to the hundreds maybe thousands of deaths from animals. Suicide is actually in the top five causes of death worldwide and this was amazing to me. I like learning things like that because it really gets me thinking. It helps me apply it to real life situations.

The challenge of arguing

As many of you have said, I also struggled a lot to find an article that really grabbed my attention. Everything I could find was essentially politics in one way or the other. I’m still not so sure about what I picked, but I’ll try to get the best out of it.
I consider myself a spiritual-minded person; I love pondering about things in life that usually are inexplicable or don’t have answers. Because of that, I think that I’m more attracted to pieces of writing that help me find the answers to those questions and also help me be a better person. For some reason I like drama, it feels that when there is drama in my life, is when I learn the most. I also love anything that inspires me and is uplifting in some way. Narratives on a piece of writing also tend to have a greater effect on me. In contrast, when I feel that my values are threatened by somebody’s argument, I tend to get defensive and that might be the only time you’ll find me arguing about something. It’s been challenging to have to argue about something. I always associated arguing with fighting for some reason and I don’t like fights.

The search for an opinion peice worth reading

It takes a lot to catch my attention and keep it. There aren't very many subjects that interest me to the point that I can effectively create an opinion and really stand up for it. I spent a lot of time looking for an article the I knew I wanted to write about because well, there are a lot of articles about politics and government out there and most of the time those subjects don't interest me. After some searching I did find something I was interested in and I found that it was pretty easy for me to write about issues that I have already formed opinions about. I found it difficult to read the article when I disagreed, which I believe we have briefly talked about in class, and it has to do with fear that the author may be right. I react best to Logos because I like to see the cold hard facts, because much of the time facts cannot be debated, they are what they are. I think that it really brings out an interesting paper when I enjoy the topic and when I address several different points within the topic, whether I agree with them or not. This particular assignment has helped me to consider other views of a subject that I may have strong views about, and take a look and pro's and con's of several sides of the issue.

Welcome to my journey to find an opinion.

When we were first given the assignment to find an opinion piece to write about I thought “oh this will be a breeze.” But as I started my journey I realized that it would in fact require much more effort that I had before assumed.
To find my opinion piece I needed to take a journey within a sort of soul searching adventure to find what it is that makes me tick, and what if anything would grab my interest in a way that I could write a “strong” response to. Typically I am laid back relaxed individual who can see the positive side to almost any situation. So I figured that whatever I might find I would probably agree at least in part with what they were arguing.
As I searched for a piece I found that most things just didn’t grab me. Logos is neat I always enjoy learning new facts but not to the point that it truly ignites me. And a solid use of Ethos never hurts I enjoy knowing that the person writing has something to back them up; be it experience or whatever the case may be. But I believe what rhetoric is best fit to lure me in so to speak Pathos if you start to talk to my emotional side I really react to that. And it doesn’t seem to matter which emotion is evoked: anger, sorrow, humor. They are appealing to each in its own unique way. I really enjoyed this assignment and learning more about myself as I searched to find my opinion.

As I stumble through the net looking for inspiration-

It took me a long time to find an opinion piece that I inspired a strong response out of me. Some pieces grabbed my attention with a catchy title, but fell threw in their execution. I had found a piece that I could relate to, but I wanted to find something that I could argue against. I'm finding that when I disagree with an authors article it sure is a lot easier to respond strongly, and a strong response is what I wanted for this assignment. Most of the pieces that I read dealt with topics that I just have little or no interest in. All rhetorical strategies seem to work on me if they are well executed. By that I mean if the author uses specific concrete examples to back up his argument, and if the author establishes his credibility on the subject in question. As I read through the opinion pieces, the ones dealing with technology kept my interest the best. And the piece that I finally went with (which is tech oriented) only seemed to inspire a mild response at first, but the more I thought about it the stronger my rebuttal got until I was sure that this was the piece that I wanted to go with. So that's all I have for this blog assignment, now i'm gonna get back to finishing up my summary strong response paper. :)

I definitely took a lot of time to pick an opinion piece that actually entertained me. I also wanted to make sure that I could argue with the writer. I tend to be more passionate towards being able to disagree with the writer than to just agree with him/her. I ranged from politics to any form of entertainment. There were so many boring pieces that just caused me to feel like I wanted to pull my teeth out of my mouth just to stay focused. But eventually I decided upon the critique of a well known critic. I choose not to disclose the name of this critic for the sake of offending anyone. I am familiar with this critic and his critiques on many different films. This critic has expressed that his critiquing strategy is more “relative, not absolute.” He bases his reviews on who he feels is the prospective audience, yet he considers the value as a whole. I know that for so many years, this critic has always had reviews that I would see as either a hit or a miss. I have actually disagreed with him more than not. I am interested in being entertained and on being able to understand the background of the writer to at least know why he said what he said. I suppose I prefer to be entertained because I don’t want to feel like I am wasting my time when reading anything. I think I lean towards pathos and logos to pick a topic because I want to find a good relation with the story. Experience helps me to choose a side and I know this critique didn’t match with how I felt about the film. This critic was into journalism, what does he know about science? Newer films are trying to be as accurate as possible to logic, such as how an advanced plane flies so fast? That shows how far we’ve come in advancing our human technology. Journalism and science are two very different subject.