Unit 2 Materials
Table of Contents
Sample Paper 2 Prompt: Chris .................................................................................................................. 2
Sample Prompt Paper 2: Matt .................................................................................................................. 3
Sample Prompt Paper 2 (Jenny): Comparing Strategies in Carr & Thompson .......................................... 4
Links and Videos that Can be Used to Introduce Carr .............................................................................. 4
Researching/Identifying the Conversation ............................................................................................... 4
Assorted (Unedited) Notes on claims, evidence & strategies in Carr ....................................................... 5
Some Early Discussion Questions ........................................................................................................... 12
Carr & Academic Discourse ..................................................................................................................... 12
Carr Discussion/Analysis Questions & Group Exercises (Mersedeh) ...................................................... 13
Some Texts to Set up Class Debate Challenging/Defending Carr’s Position........................................... 30
Template Sentences for Paper 2 ............................................................................................................. 31
Steps to Crafting a Body Paragraph Focused on Analysis ....................................................................... 32
Overview of Rhetorical Strategies .......................................................................................................... 33
Aristotelian Appeals: Logos, Ethos, and Pathos ...................................................................................... 38
How Strategies Construct Logos/Ethos/Pathos ...................................................................................... 39
Group Work: Identifying Strategies ........................................................................................................ 41
Carr Excerpts for Analysis ....................................................................................................................... 42
Carr Charting Exercise: What/How/Why (Mercedes) ............................................................................. 43
Sample Rhetorical Strategy Papers ......................................................................................................... 46
The Rhetorical Strategy of Metadiscourse.............................................................................................. 48
Sample Body Paragraphs Analyzing Carr ................................................................................................ 50
Sample Draft Carr Paper ......................................................................................................................... 51
TIPS & GUIDELINES.................................................................................................................................. 54
Evaluation ................................................................................................................................................... 56
Style and Syntax as Strategy: Close Reading Tips ................................................................................... 56
Frames & Framing ................................................................................................................................... 58
How Texas Teaches History By ELLEN BRESLER ROCKMORE. NY Times, Oct 21, 2015 ........ 59
Notes on Fallacies & the Evaluation of Argument .................................................................................. 61
Analyze the Statements & Identify Weaknesses/Fallacy ........................................................................ 67
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Assignment 2 Sample Prompts
Unit 2
Sample Paper 2 Prompt: Chris
Nicholas Carr argues in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that the internet “is chipping away [his] capacity
for concentration and contemplation.” In this paper you will describe Carr’s overall argument, and
analyze some of the rhetorical strategies that he uses to engage and persuade readers. Your paper
should identify the rhetorical strategies used, examine why they were chosen, and analyze the effects
they have on an audience. It should also discuss the effectiveness and relative strength/weakness of one
or two of these strategies.
Introduction: In your introduction, describe the larger conversation to which Carr is responding and its
significance (why we should care); introduce his text and overall argument; provide your own evaluative
thesis about whether or not Carr’s argument is persuasive, and provide a roadmap for how your paper
will proceed.
Body Paragraphs: Analyze two or three rhetorical strategies drawn on by Carr. You should discuss at
least one of the three Aristotelian Appeals (logos, ethos, & pathos), connecting each to a set of specific
rhetorical moves and choices. For example, if you are discussing ethos, you may wish to consider things
like word choice, rebuttals, how the reader is addressed, evidence presented, etc. You should also
examine one or two other strategies (see the Reader pp. 67-71.)
In each case you will provide 1) at least one textual example, in order to analyze and evaluate, and
explain 2) how the strategy works, 3) why Carr specifically uses this strategy to advance his argument, 4)
what the effect is on his intended audience, and 5) how well it furthers his central claim. For one of the
strategies, you should also evaluate 6) how effectively Carr uses this strategy (strengths and
weaknesses).
Conclusion: In the conclusion present your response to Carr’s argument. You can also discuss lessons
you draw from analyzing Carr’s strategies – what did writing the paper reveal to you about his
argument, or arguments more generally?
Requirements:
 6 pages (although longer is acceptable)
 MLA format and citation
 Works Cited page (MLA format)
Important Dates:
 October 21stth, 9 am: 2 copies of your Rough Draft due in class for Peer Workshop.
 October 24th, 26th, and 28th: Conferencing. Class canceled on 26th and 28th.
 October 31st Final Draft due
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Sample Prompt Paper 2: Matt
Nicholas Carr argues in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that the internet “is chipping away [his] capacity
for concentration and contemplation.” In this paper you will describe Carr’s project and argument, and
analyze the rhetorical strategies that the he uses to engage and persuade readers. Your paper should
identify the rhetorical strategies used, examine why they were chosen, and analyze the effects they
have on an audience. It should also discuss the effectiveness and relative strength of these strategies.
In your introduction, describe the larger conversation to which Carr is responding and its significance;
introduce his text and central claim; provide your own evaluative thesis about whether or not Carr’s
argument is persuasive; and provide a roadmap for how your paper will proceed.
In your analysis, examine each of the three Aristotelian Appeals (logos, ethos, & pathos), connecting
each one to a specific rhetorical strategy. In each case you will provide 1) a textual example, in order to
analyze and evaluate 2) how the appeal and strategy work together, 3) why Carr specifically uses this
strategy to make his appeal, 4) what their effect is on his intended audience, and 5) how well they
further his central claim. Finally in each paragraph, assess 6) how effective Carr uses this strategy,
evaluating how it successfully incorporates more than one appeal or how it might be less effective for
different audiences.
Using Carr’s text as an example, conclude by reflecting on the significance of appealing to logos, ethos,
and pathos through the use of specific strategies in developing arguments in general. What lessons do
these appeals and strategies reveal about writing arguments?
In this paper, you will do the following:




Make connections between Aristotelian appeals and specific strategies in Carr’s text, analyzing
how they work, why they are used, their effect on his audience, and how they develop his
central claim.
Use the language of argument, Aristotelian appeals, and strategies in your analysis and
evaluation: central claim, logos, ethos, pathos, specific strategies, etc.
Closely analyze Carr’s text for word choice, values, and assumptions about his intended
audience.
Effectively organize your paper, developing clear topic sentences, using transitional phrases,
providing relevant textual support, and using metadiscourse to guide your reader.
Requirements:
 5 to 6 pages (although longer is acceptable)
 MLA format and citation
 Works Cited page (MLA format)
Important Dates:
 October 21stth, 9 am: 2 copies of your Rough Draft due in class for Peer Workshop.
 October 24th, 26th, and 28th: Conferencing. Class canceled on 26th and 28th.
 October 31st, 9 am: Final Draft due to Turnitin (Blackboard) and hardcopy in class.
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Sample Prompt Paper 2 (Jenny): Comparing Strategies in Carr & Thompson
In this option you will work with both Thompson’s and Carr’s texts, evaluating and comparing the
persuasiveness of their rhetorical strategies and appeals to determine which you think is more effective
and why. You will need to provide a significant number of examples from the text, along with your own
detailed analysis, to help support your argument. In this project, you will be taking a look at the larger
issues they discuss (the impact of digital communication technologies), as well as at how these have
been taken up for their own purposes (that is, what they choose to look at and what they seem to
ignore).
Links and Videos that Can be Used to Introduce Carr




Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
Carr's blog page and his wikipedia page
Videos of Carr explaining his arguments:
1) 6 minute PBS interview with Carr explaining his main arguments
2) video interview with Canadian host Steve Paikin ("Is the Internet Making Us
Stupid?" 16 minutes)
3) The Harvard Book Store presents Nicholas Carr: The Shallows - What the Internet Is
Doing to Our Brains (49 mins)
4) Presentation at the Commonwealth Club of California, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
(60 minutes - you can select "chapters" from the talk)
5) Nicholas Carr & Stephen Fry on The Effects of Web Culture (9 minutes)
6) Scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey where Dave deactivates HAL.
IQ Squared debate featuring Carr (IQ Squared site, and from YouTube - starts at about
10 minutes)
Researching/Identifying the Conversation
After Carr wrote his article many authors responded directly to the claims, and Carr was invited to a
series of debates. Students could be asked to report on some of these in order to help think through
both the strategies Carr uses and strengths/weaknesses in his argument.

Encyclopedia Britannica hosted a forum on Carr's text. Many prominent writers responded with
short, lively posts (1-2 pages). Here are some examples:
Clay Shirky: Why Abundance is Good: My Reply to Nick Carr
Nick Carr: Why Skepticism is Good: My Reply to Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky: Why Abundance Should Breed Optimism: A Second Reply to Nick Carr
Andrew Keen: The New Techno-Historical Determinism


Clay Shirky has been one of Carr’s biggest critics: "Does The Internet Make You Smarter?"
Stephen Pinker penned an op-ed disagreeing strongly with Carr’s understanding of cognition
and his major lines of argument: "Mind Over Mass Media" (html) and also as a pdf.
IQ squared debate in which Carr and Andrew Keen debate opponents. Short talks, many
debaters tricks, could be used to look at strategies. The topic is whether smart technologies are

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hurting or harming our intelligence and literacy.
Assorted (Unedited) Notes on claims, evidence & strategies in Carr
Exposure to new media is altering people’s mind, reducing the capacity for sustained attention and
reading complex texts. Hard to concentrate.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad
influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net,
there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains
obscure.
Evidence: his own experience finding it hard to concentrate – “the deep reading that used to come
naturally has become a struggle.”
Evidence: His friends, “friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re
having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long
pieces of writing.”
Evidence of one person’s intuitions (near end) of playwright: In a recent essay, the playwright Richard
Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake: I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal
(my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate
personality…As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we
risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information
accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
Evidence - research: A recently published study of online research habits…from University College London,
suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think..
Evidence: research/authority: Wolf. We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental
psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the
Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style
that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep
reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose
commonplace.
Evidence: Example – Nietzsche’s typewriter. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page
had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches…The typewriter rescued him, at
least for a time. Once he had mastered touchtyping, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips
of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
Strategy: CONCESSION AND DIVISION.
“Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell
phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our
medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of
thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.
THE NET SWALLOWS ALL CLAIM – AND IT RESHAPES TRADITIONAL MEDIA
p. 1 For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the
information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
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p. 4: In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which
at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other
information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably
powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s
becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and
our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the
medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the
content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may
announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our
attention and diffuse our concentration.
[BUT CLAIMS THE NET DOES IT – NOT! COMMERCIALISM DOES. Educational hypertexts didn’t operate
this way.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become
attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new
expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten
their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in
March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article
abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick
“taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading
the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
“But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s,
media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the
process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and
contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly
moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a
guy on a Jet Ski.”
IDEA THAT MEDIUM IS MESSAGE. “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part
in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A.
Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns,
from rhetoric to telegram style.”
OBJECTION – the net is not one thing. It’s true that writing, print, etc. had a big impact, and
shape thinking. But the internet, precisely because it swallows all, is not just “media.” It is
books, and radio, and tv, etc.
PLASTICITY ARGUMENT
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think
that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our
skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s
not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study
at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old
connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly,
altering the way it functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that
extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the
qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century,
provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford
6
described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent
world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point
of reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But
it also took something away. [BUT BAD EXAMPLE – SURELY WE LIKE THE CLOCK!!! IT WAS A GOOD
TRADE OFF!!]
As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book,
Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that
emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older
one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted,
the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our
senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use
to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their
brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as
operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor.
Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level. The Internet
promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition.
■ KEY CLAIMS!!!
TAYLORISM AND INTERNET – CLAIM AND ANALOGY
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks
to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s
ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient
and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers
are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of
what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and
the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a
company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it
does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it
carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the
results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning
from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing
doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search
engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our
brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few
years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.”
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by
an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical
process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world
we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an
opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster
processor and a bigger hard drive.
Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a
countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates
7
bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a
substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the
dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able
to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable
when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of
real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was
shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information,
spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The
Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual
laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds….As New York University professor Clay
Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again,
the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
STRATEGY – PROLEPSIS – Objections and rebuttals
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as
Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a
golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and
although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind
of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the
knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off
within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by
any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and
analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep
thinking. [SEEMS A WEAK REBUTTAL]
CONCLUSION - WEAK
HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes
the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency.
BECAUSE HE HAS TO ACT FAST – OXYGEN, Etc.
Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001,
people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the
essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the
world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
WHAT OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND WARMTH AND PETS AND CRAZINESS – NOT COLD, ROBOTIC. MAY BE
FLAT.
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Carr Quotations for Discussion & Analysis
1.
Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly,
coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “brain. “Dave, my mind is going,”
HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.” I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an
uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the
neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.”
2.
Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related
works; they propel you toward them.
3.
As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive
channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of
thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and
contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a
swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the
surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
4.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—
literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the
Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I
follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online
media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in
college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on
the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has
changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?” Bruce
Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the
Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb
a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been
on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in
a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting
the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and
Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three
or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
5.
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological
experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a
recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College
London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As
part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the
behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a
U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of
written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,”
hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They
typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out
to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went
back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
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It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new
forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents
pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the
traditional sense.
6.
“…we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our
medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—
perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a
developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story
and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading
promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be
weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the
printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.
7.
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that
extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities
of those technologies…. Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or
exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been
written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The
Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
8.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the
medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the
content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance,
may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result
is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration… Old media have little choice but to play by
the new-media rules.
9.
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church,
and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism…Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data
it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day,
according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that
increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for
the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind… In Google’s view, information is a
kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency.
The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more
productive we become as thinkers.
10.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while
pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn
their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected
directly to our brains…their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were
supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that
intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated,
measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little
place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be
fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard
10
drive. The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only
built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster
we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities
Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.
Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of
data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these
companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their
economic interest to drive us to distraction.
11.
As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the
printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the
myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver. So, yes, you should be skeptical of my
skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved
correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual
discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace
the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a
sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the
author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the
quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of
contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and
analogies, foster our own ideas.
12.
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s
emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark,
its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final
reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with
the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business
with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the
steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most
human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we
come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence
that flattens into artificial intelligence.
11
Some Early Discussion Questions
1. Carr’s text was written in 2008. Much about the way we read and write online has changed
since then. In particular, we have seen the explosive growth of “social media” – Facebook,
Instagram, twitter, snapchat, etc. We have also seen the growth of tablets, ipads, etc.
Do such changes reinforce his argument? How?
2. How are your reading habits affected by social media, your smartphone, and all the other digital
devices you use?
3. Have your online reading practices changed over the last 8 years?
4. Compose an overview of your main online reading and writing practices
5. Have you developed ways of coping with the challenges Carr describes?
6. Can you imagine ways of overcoming the problems Carr describes? What might some effective
strategies be?
Carr & Academic Discourse
Parfitt (Writing in Response, pp. 6-9) discusses how Carr exemplifies elements of academic discourse.
He presents a helpful close reading of some sections in Carr. This could be used to help students
understand some of the moves Carr makes.
Parfitt pages 122 – 126 discusses types of evidence and presents an “argument matrix” that models how
to start building a critique of Carr.
Both Parfitt excerpts are on the wiki as pdfs.
12
Carr Discussion/Analysis Questions & Group Exercises (Mersedeh)
SCUBA-DIVING EXERCISE:
TEXT:
1. I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or
something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming
the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the
way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or
a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of
the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the
case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety,
lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my
wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a
struggle.
2. I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of
time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.
The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or
periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick
clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not
working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets, reading and writing emails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just
tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened,
hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
CLAIM:
RHETORICAL STRATEGY(IES) USED: (explain how/why)
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS:
1. Who is Nicholas Carr? From these two paragraphs alone, what impression do you have of him?
2. How does Carr primarily use the internet? Do you believe he enjoys surfing the net?
13
3. What do these two paragraphs accomplish in the overall mission of the entire text? What is their
function? To answer this, imagine if we delete them from the article; how would the entire argument
change without these this excerpt?
4. Please list all the words used in Carr’s text above that you believe carry an indication of his tone:
5. What is the author’s tone in this excerpt?
6. How closely does your experience resemble Carr’s?
7. What is the most significant portion/line/sentence of this excerpt?
SCUBA-DIVING EXERCISE:
TEXT:
3. For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for
most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are
many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon
memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But
that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s,
media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they
also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my
capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the
way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the
sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
4. I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and
acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The
more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who
writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books
altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote.
“What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so
much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way
I THINK has changed?”
5. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also
has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost
totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote
earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan
Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His
14
thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short
passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted.
“I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too
much to absorb. I skim it.”
CLAIM:
RHETORICAL STRATEGY(IES) USED: (explain how/why)
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS:
1. Who is Nicholas Carr? From these three paragraphs alone, what impression do you have of him?
2. Carr references 4 specific individuals as well as his general group of friends in these 3 paragraphs. What
are your impressions of his friends? What role do these people play in Carr’s overall argument?
3. For critics of the internet, Carr and his friends sure seems to be spending lots of time on it; how exactly
does he find the internet to be harmful? Is this a problem that affects all internet users or just
intellectuals?
4. What do these three paragraphs accomplish in the overall mission of the entire text? What is their
function? To answer this, imagine if we delete them from the article; how would the entire argument
change without these this excerpt?
5. The author uses some creative, metaphoric and generally descriptive language here (find and list them);
what image does he hope to create? What does his tone reveal about his sentiments?
15
6. What is the most significant portion/line/sentence of this excerpt?
SCUBA-DIVING EXERCISE:
TEXT:
6. Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and
psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects
cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from
University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way
we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer
logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the
British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles,
e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites
exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely
returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two
pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d
save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The
authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs
that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through
titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go
online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
7. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of
text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in
the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different
kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the
self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at
Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading
Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style
that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the
kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long
and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become
“mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental
connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
CLAIM:
RHETORICAL STRATEGY(IES) USED: (explain how/why)
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS:
16
1. Does the London study qualify as valid evidence? What specific details support its validity? What would
be some reasons to doubt it?
2. Carr discusses online reading in terms of a Power Browse and compares that to more Traditional types
of reading (not genres of texts, but rather systematic approaches to the practice of reading). Brainstorm
and try to come up with as many different types of Reading as you can; Is there a need for different
types of reading?
3. Why does Carr draw a parallel between reading via newer technologies (text messages, internet, …) and
high television viewership of the ‘70s and ‘80s? What does his comparison reveal about his appraisal of
online reading?
4. What do these two paragraphs accomplish in the overall mission of the entire text? What is their
function? To answer this, imagine if we delete them from the article; how would the entire argument
change without these this excerpt?
5. How does Maryanne Wolf explain the effect of internet reading on our brains? Is she a credible source?
Is her testimony a persuasive piece of evidence in support of Carr’s argument? Why? Why not?
6. What is the most significant portion/line/sentence of this excerpt?
SCUBA-DIVING EXERCISE:
TEXT:
8. Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched
into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic
characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use
in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural
circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the
Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in
those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many
regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory
and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits
woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and
other printed works.
17
9. Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen
Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page
had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced
to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued
him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes
closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
10. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a
composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even
tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,”
the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language
often depend on the quality of pen and paper.” You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing
equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the
German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to
aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
CLAIM:
RHETORICAL STRATEGY(IES) USED: (explain how/why)
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS:
1. How does Maryanne Wolf explain the effect of literacy on our brain? Can you think of other examples
besides the Chinese ideograms that would show a similar influence?
2. How did Nietzsche’s typewriter change his writing? What does Carr hope we take away from this story?
3. Substitute Nietzsche with Kim Kardashian. Kim is well known for her writing on social media and it is no
secret that she is a huge fan of BlackBerrys, which are increasingly hard to find. Kim switches to an
iPhone out of necessity and her fans note that her tweets are not the same. Would this new example
work in Carr’s argument? Explain:
4. What is the connection between Wolf’s explanation of neural circuitry and Frederich Nietzsche
typewriter example?
18
5. What do these three paragraphs accomplish in the overall mission of the entire text? What is their
function? To answer this, imagine if we delete them from the article; how would the entire argument
change without these this excerpt?
6. What is the most significant portion/line/sentence of this excerpt?
SCUBA-DIVING EXERCISE:
TEXT:
11. The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental
meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls,
was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that
that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute
for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.”
Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds,
“has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
12. As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual
technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical
capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The
mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling
example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis
Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the
belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract
framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”
13. The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the
scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph
Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From
Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of
timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a
rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old
reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and
started obeying the clock.
14. The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the
changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical
clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the
age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes,
neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the
adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
CLAIM(S):
19
RHETORICAL STRATEGY(IES) USED: (explain how/why)
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS:
1. According to Carr, what does James Olds believe to be true about our brains (one sentence)? Is this a
persuasive piece of evidence for Carr’s argument? Why does he choose to include it here?
2. According to Carr, what does Lewis Mumford mean in paragraph 12 when discussing the clock? How
exactly did the clock change how we view ‘human events’?
3. According to Carr, how is Weizenbaum’s view on the influence of the clock different from Mumford’s?
Why does Carr use two separate sources to comment on the effect of the clock?
4. Paragraph 14 distinguishes between metaphoric language and our concept of self and other biological
implications of technology. What is the primary difference here? Is one more serious than the other?
5. What do these four paragraphs accomplish in the overall mission of the entire text? What is their
function? To answer this, imagine if we delete them from the article; how would the entire argument
change without these this excerpt?
6. What is the most significant portion/line/sentence of this excerpt?
SCUBA-DIVING EXERCISE:
TEXT:
15. The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a
paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer,
which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the
function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The
Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other
intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our
typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
16. When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It
injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it
surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail
20
message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a
newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
17. The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As
people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to
adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads,
and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd
their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York
Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its
design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick
“taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages
and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
18. Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted
such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s
been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming
us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
CLAIM(S):
RHETORICAL STRATEGY(IES) USED: (explain how/why)
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS:
1. Who was Alan Turing? How do you interpret Turing’s comment regarding the potential computer? Do
you believe that Carr feels the same way about the consolidating potential of computers that Turing
did? Why?
2. What is a gewgaw? Why does Carr use this word? What is Carr’s overall tone? (provide examples)
3. Carr discusses “old media” and “new media”; provide examples of each group and how you believe he
interprets the difference between the two? Which one is more influential? Why?
4. What is the purpose of paragraph 18?
5. What do these four paragraphs accomplish in the overall mission of the entire text? What is their
function? To answer this, imagine if we delete them from the article; how would the entire argument
change without these this excerpt?
21
6. What is the most significant portion/line/sentence of this excerpt?
SCUBA-DIVING EXERCISE:
TEXT:
19. About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young
man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel
plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at
improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s
owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking
machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the
machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing
different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an
“algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees
grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than
automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
20. More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial
Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight
industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers
throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum
efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their
work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911
treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the
“one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of
thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor,
Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of
society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared;
“in the future the system must be first.”
21. Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial
manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software
coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the
mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection,
transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on
finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of
what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
CLAIM(S):
RHETORICAL STRATEGY(IES) USED: (explain how/why)
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS:
22
1. Based on Carr’s description of Frederick Taylor’s experiments at the Midvale Steel Plant, how valuable
do you feel Taylor’s contribution was? What is Carr’s tone in paragraph 19?
2. In paragraph 20, we once again hear Carr refer to speed, efficiency in his discussion of Taylor and the
systematization that came with the industrial revolution (“substitution of science for rule of thumb”); Is
Carr asking us to imagine an alternative system? If so, what would that system be based on? Would Carr,
himself, be happier in such a system? Why? Why not?
3. Carr mentions the ethic of industrial manufacturing; what does he mean exactly?
4. How should we feel about computer engineers and software coders being in-charge of our intellectual
lives? How does Carr expect us to feel? (provide examples)
5. What do these three paragraphs accomplish in the overall mission of the entire text? What is their
function? To answer this, imagine if we delete them from the article; how would the entire argument
change without these this excerpt?
6. What is the most significant portion/line/sentence of this excerpt?
SCUBA-DIVING EXERCISE:
TEXT:
22. Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the
Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism.
Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science
of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes
of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of
experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine
the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from
it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
23. The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information
and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search
engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you
back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian
resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of
23
information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we
become as thinkers.
24. Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google
while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire
to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be
connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—
or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work
on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had
all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter
than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google
is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
CLAIM(S):
RHETORICAL STRATEGY(IES) USED: (explain how/why)
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS:
1. Carr refers to Google as the internet’s “high church” and Taylorism as its “religion”; what does this
comparison reveal about Carr’s opinion of Google
2. Carr states that Google not only facilitates the search for information, but also dictates how we extract
meaning from it. What exactly does this mean? Give an example of how Google can do this
3. Carr describes what he believes Google’s view of technology to be; what, however, is Carr’s theory on
this? What is his vision of an ideal and appropriate use of technology?
4. By linking Google’s founders to the topic of artificial intelligence, and tying that in with the image of HAL,
what conclusion does Carr hope we arrive at? What do you believe is motivating Google and others to
develop artificial intelligence systems?
5. What do these three paragraphs accomplish in the overall mission of the entire text? What is their
function? To answer this, imagine if we delete them from the article; how would the entire argument
change without these this excerpt?
24
6. What is the most significant portion/line/sentence of this excerpt?
SCUBA-DIVING EXERCISE:
TEXT:
25. Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math
whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer
scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a
desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been
solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin
and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
26. Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were
supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It
suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps
that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we
go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for
insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster
processor and a bigger hard drive.
27. The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is
not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning
business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and
pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information
about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have
a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the
more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading
or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
CLAIM(S):
RHETORICAL STRATEGY(IES) USED: (explain how/why)
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS:
1. If you did not know that Carr was talking about Google’s founders, what type of people would come to
mind from his description in the first sentence of paragraph 25? Is that a fair representation?
25
2. What do ambiguity and contemplation represent for Carr? Are these concepts directly contradictory to
the use and advancement of technology?
3. In paragraph 27 there is a major shift in strategy; what do you believe that to be? How does it affect
Carr’s overall argument?
4. What do these three paragraphs accomplish in the overall mission of the entire text? What is their
function? To answer this, imagine if we delete them from the article; how would the entire argument
change without these this excerpt?
5. What is the most significant portion/line/sentence of this excerpt?
SCUBA-DIVING EXERCISE:
TEXT:
28. Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress,
there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus,
Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the
written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would,
in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become
forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper
instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite
ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates
wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted.
He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information,
spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
29. The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another
round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy
availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and
weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would
undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition
and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments
made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were
unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
30. So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of
the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, datastoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then
again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces
something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages
26
promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the
intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up
by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that
matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own
ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
CLAIM(S):
RHETORICAL STRATEGY(IES) USED: (explain how/why)
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS:
1. Has Carr had a change of heart in this section? If not, then what is the purpose of introducing doubt?
2. Carr compares his concerns to those expressed by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus; what does this
comparison suggest about both the individuals concerned and the subject of their concerns?
3. Clay Shirky is a recognized expert, and outspoken defender of the internet. In his discussion of the
Gutenburg printing press, Carr references Shirkey’s agreement that the printing press was largely
negative. What do you make of this move? Is Carr manipulating his audience?
4. The topic sentences give the semblance that Carr is conceding a bit or at least open to the possibility
that he may be wrong; based on the rest of his paragraphs here, do you feel that that sentiment is
accurate? If not, then what is the purpose of appearing open-minded?
5. What do these three paragraphs accomplish in the overall mission of the entire text? What is their
function? To answer this, imagine if we delete them from the article; how would the entire argument
change without these this excerpt?
6. What is the most significant portion/line/sentence of this excerpt?
SCUBA-DIVING EXERCISE:
TEXT:
27
31. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice
something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the
playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the
complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate
personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed
and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all
(myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—
evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly
available.”
32. As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,”
Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin
as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of
a button.”
33. I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the
computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after
another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m
afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring
of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film,
who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel
scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have
become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the
essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our
understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
CLAIM(S):
RHETORICAL STRATEGY(IES) USED: (explain how/why)
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS:
1. What are the “quiet spaces” that Carr is referring to? Why does Carr believe them to be so important?
(Describe)
2. Carr introduces Richard Foreman’s quote as “what’s at stake”; how does that introduction guide our
interpretation of that quote? How important is this to Carr?
3. Analyze the metaphoric language Foreman uses and how each description is significant in understanding
his ideal individual:
o “complex, dense, “’cathedral-like’”
o “educated and articulate” (what is the difference? Why does each matter?)
o “personally constructed and unique version”
28
o
“complex density” replaced by “instantly available”
4. What are “Pancake People”? Is Carr warning us that this will be our fate or is he alerting us that we have
already become so?
5. Analyze the last two sentences of Carr’s article and describe in your own words:
6. What do these three paragraphs accomplish in the overall mission of the entire text? What is their
function? To answer this, imagine if we delete them from the article; how would the entire argument
change without these this excerpt?
7. What is the most significant portion/line/sentence of this excerpt?
29
Some Texts to Set up Class Debate Challenging/Defending Carr’s Position
Use the texts above that are critical (Pinker, Shirky, etc.) with short texts below that could be used to
defend and complicate Carr
 ‘The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus
Screens.” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/
 Does Digital Media Make Us Bad Writers? Discussion of Stanford Writing project.
http://spotlight.macfound.org/featured-stories/entry/does-digital-media-make-us-bad-writers







Hooper, V., Herath, C. (2014) ‘Is Google Making Us stupid? The Impact of the Internet on
Reading Behaviour’. [online]. https://domino.fov.unimb.si/proceedings.nsf/0/245b68041b843574c1257cee003df66a/$FILE/04_Hooper_Herath.pdf
Sparrow, B., Liu, J., Wegner, D M. (2011) “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences
of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” Sciencemag. Available at:
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~wegner/pdfs/science.1207745.full.pdf
Jabr, F. (2013) ‘The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus
Screens”. Scientific American. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paperscreens/
Michael S. Rosenwald. “Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming,
researchers say.” Washington Post, April 6 2014. http://tinyurl.com/qfdfvpv
Interview with Marianne Wolf. “Is Online Skimming Hurting Reading Comprehension?”
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/04/09/online-reading-comprehension
Annie Murphy Paul. “Students Reading E-Books Are Losing Out, Study Suggests.”
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/students-reading-e-books-are-losing-outstudy-suggests/
Robinson Meyer, “To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand”
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/to-remember-a-lecture-better-takenotes-by-hand/361478/
30
Template Sentences for Paper 2
Introduction + overview of your project
“A Rhetorical strategy is a particular way in which authors craft language so as to have an effect on
readers. Strategies are means of persuasion, ways of using language to get readers’ attention, interest, or
agreement. It is important to be able to identify these strategies so as to…”
“In my paper I will begin by briefly describing the project and argument made by…”
“I will then identify and examine some of the rhetorical strategies used by…Next, I will present an
explanation of these strategies, explaining how they work and why they are used…Finally, I will conclude
my paper with a discussion of the significance of these authors’ work [or] a comparison of their use of
rhetorical strategies.”
Project and Argument Statements: “In article X, Tannen, professor of linguistics at…investigates Y…
Tannen’s project is A, or as she puts it “B, C and D.” Tannen uses several primary methods to achieve this,
most notably E, F and G…”
“Tannen’s central argument is H, or as she puts it, “Bla bla bla.” Tannen claims X is the case/advances
argument Y/asserts Z.”
Rhetorical Strategies: “Chua uses a number of rhetorical strategies throughout her text. However, I will
focus on J and K, which appear in her discussion of L…”
“A clear example of this strategy occurs on page iv, when Chua states… This strategy works by doing
C…it is effective because it does K…it has the effect of P… Why engage such a strategy? Chua chooses
this strategy in order to…”
“A second example of this rhetorical strategy is…”
Conclusion: “The significance of Chua’s project can be discerned in F…She stresses the importance of
Y, and argues that insufficient attention has been paid to Z…Chua claims that it is crucial that X… This
paper demonstrates the value of H, and how by paying close attention to the way authors do J we can see
T…”
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Steps to Crafting a Body Paragraph Focused on Analysis
1. Topic Sentence that asserts a claim (names strategy and its role)
_________________________ uses ___________________________ to ____________________________________.
(author/speaker)
(strategy)
(function)
2. Set-up and show strategy in action with “quote/s”
3. Explain in depth HOW this strategy works here for
 intended impact on audience (how author intends it to “move” the audience)
 persuasiveness (convincing, credible, compelling)
4. Evaluate use of the rhetorical strategy
 assessing strength (quality, poor/excellent choice because…)
 audience actual reaction (yourself and intended audiences)
 function (role it plays in the argument, fulfills writer’s purpose)
President Obama uses multiple historical references as evidence to back up his
claims about the necessity of education in a democracy. Obama creates a sense of solidarity
and intimacy when he shows off his knowledge of Hampton “University 101” amidst
chuckles and cheers from the audience. When he quotes famed escaped slave Frederick
Douglass saying “education… means emancipation,” Obama provides support in the form of
a revered black hero of education to invoke the American ideal that “education can fortify
us to rise above any barrier.” He uses the pronouns “us” and “our” in this speech to further
create a shared racial history of both dreaming of better days and overcoming tough times.
Obama shares in depth the life story of recently deceased black activist Dorothy Height and
alludes to Martin Luther King Jr. when he praises Dr. Height as “one of the giants upon
whose shoulders I stand.” The cumulative effect of these historical references to influential
moments in black history is important for the pride of his audience, who is listening to the
very first black president create a vision for “the next great chapter in America’s story.”
While some might say the choice to reference important figures in African-American
history is expected, it is also most assuredly strategic. Obama uses black Americans as an
inclusive symbol for all Americans as this historical evidence supports his call to action for
not just Hampton graduates, but all educated citizens in a democratic society. He reminds
students the act of pursuing dreams is inherent in the American spirit – an effective
strategy that widens the demographic and political reach of this speech over time.
32
Overview of Rhetorical Strategies
Rhetorical strategies are tools that help writers craft language so as to have an effect on readers.
Strategies are means of persuasion, a way of using language to get readers’ attention and agreement.
In your writing or your discussion, you will need to ask and answer certain questions. Why does the
author choose to use that strategy in that place? What does he or she want to evoke in the reader?
How do these strategies help the author build his or her argument? How do these strategies emphasize
the claims the author makes or the evidence he or she uses?
When describing why a strategy is used, you may also want to consider alternative strategies, and think
about how they would work differently. It might be helpful to consider what would happen if the
strategy were left out – what difference would it make to the argument? This may help you figure out
why the particular strategy was chosen.
Remember that any term we have looked at that can be used to describe an argument, can be used
strategically. This includes evidence, definitions, metaphors, the GASCAP terms, rebuttals and qualifiers,
framing, etc.
When Discussing Rhetorical Strategies, Remember to:
1. Identify rhetorical strategies in the text
2. Describe how they work
3. Describe why they are used – what purpose do they accomplish?
4. Always include a discussion of how this strategy helps the author develop and support the
argument.
The following is a list of commonly used strategies and questions that will help you consider why the
author may have chosen to use those strategies.
Authorities or “big names” – Frequently an author will quote from a famous person or well-known
authority on the topic being discussed.
 How does this appeal to authority build trust in her argument that the consensus can be
trusted?
 How does this appeal tap into assumptions about scientific method
Cause and effect analysis: Analyzes why something happens and describes the consequences of a string
of events.
 Does the author examine past events or their outcomes?
 Is the purpose to inform, speculate, or argue about why an identifiable fact happens the way it
does?
Commonplaces – Also known as hidden assumptions, hidden beliefs, and ideologies. Commonplaces
include assumptions, many of them unconscious, that groups of people hold in common.
 What hidden assumptions or beliefs does the speaker have about the topic? How is the speaker
or author appealing to the hidden assumptions of the audience?
 Who is the intended audience of this piece? What are some assumptions of this intended
audience?
Comparison and contrast: Discusses similarities and differences.
33



Does the text contain two or more related subjects?
How are they alike? different?
How does this comparison further the argument or a claim?
Definition –When authors define certain words, these definitions are specifically formulated for the
specific purpose he or she has in mind. In addition, these definitions are crafted uniquely for the
intended audience.
 Who is the intended audience?
 Does the text focus on any abstract, specialized, or new terms that need further explanation so
the readers understand the point?
 How has the speaker or author chosen to define these terms for the audience?
 What effect might this definition have on the audience, or how does this definition help further
the argument?
Description: Details sensory perceptions of a person, place, or thing.
 Does a person, place, or thing play a prominent role in the text?
 Does the tone, pacing, or overall purpose of the essay benefit from sensory details?
 What emotions might these details evoke in the audience? (See Pathos)
 How does this description help the author further the argument?
Division and classification: Divides a whole into parts or sorts related items into categories.
 Is the author trying to explain a broad and complicated subject?
 Does it benefit the text to reduce this subject to more manageable parts to focus the
discussion?
Exemplification: Provides examples or cases in point.
 What examples, facts, statistics, cases in point, personal experiences, or interview questions
does the author add to illustrate claims or illuminate the argument?
 What effect might these have on the reader?
Ethos – Aristotle’s term ethos refers to the credibility, character or personality of the speaker or author
or someone else connected to the argument. Ethos brings up questions of ethics and trust between the
speaker or author and the audience. How is the speaker or author building credibility for the argument?
How and why is the speaker or author trying to get the audience to trust her or him? See the discussion
on Aristotelian Appeals in the textbook.
 Aristotle says that a speaker builds credibility by demonstrating that he or she is fair,
knowledgeable about a topic, trustworthy, and considerate.
 What specifically does the author do to obtain the reader’s trust? How does he or she show
fairness? Understanding of the topic? Trustworthy? Considerate of the reader’s needs?
 How does she construct credibility for her argument?
Identification – This is rhetorician Kenneth Burke’s term for the act of “identifying” with another person
who shares your values or beliefs. Many speakers or authors try to identify with an audience or
convince an audience to identify with them and their argument.
 How does the author build a connection between himself or herself and the audience?
Logos – Loosely defined, logos refers to the use of logic, reason, facts, statistics, data, and numbers.
Very often, logos seems tangible and touchable, so much more real and “true” than other rhetorical
34
strategies that it does not seem like a persuasive strategy at all. See the discussion on Aristotelian
Appeals in the textbook.
 How and why does the author or speaker chose logos?
 How does the author show there are good reasons to support his or her argument?
 What kinds of evidence does he or she use?
Metadiscourse – Metadiscourse can be described as language about language. It announces to the
reader what the writer is doing, helping the reader to recognize the author’s plan. (Example: In my
paper . . .) Metadiscourse can be used both to announce the overall project or purpose of the paper and
to announce its argument. It also provides signposts along the way, guiding the reader to what will
come next and showing how that is connected to what has come before. See the discussion of
Metadiscourse in the textbook for more details.
 Metadiscourse can signal the tone the author wants to convey. What is the author’s voice in
this paper? How does she enter in and guide the reader through the text?
 What role does she adopt? What voice does she use?
Metaphors, analogies, similes –An analogy compares two parallel terms or situations in which the traits
of one situation are argued to be similar to another—often one relatively firm and concrete, and the
other less familiar and concrete. This allows the author to use concrete, easily understood ideas, to
clarify a less obvious point.
Similarly, metaphors and similes assign help an author frame the argument, to pay attention to some
elements of a situation and ignore others or to assign the characteristics of one thing to another.
 What two things are being compared?
 How does this comparison help an audience view the argument in a new way? How does this
frame shape the argument?
Motive – Sometimes an author may reference the motives of his or her opponents.
 Why we should or shouldn’t trust someone’s argument –(ex. if the CEO of Krispy Kreme
doughnuts argues against nutritional information on product packaging)
Narration: Recounts an event.
 Is the narrator trying to report or recount an anecdote, an experience, or an event? Is it telling a
story?
 How does this narrative illustrate or clarify the claim or argument?
 What effect might this story have on the audience?
 How does this narrative further the argument?
Pathos – Pathos refers to feelings. The author or speaker wants her audience to feel the same emotions
she is feeling, whether or not they agree on the actual topic. That way, because they feel the same
emotions, they are more likely to agree with the author later on.



What specific emotions does the author evoke?
How does she do it?
How does the author use these emotions as a tool to persuade the audience?
Precedent – When an author or speaker argues from precedent, he or she references a previous
situation, one that can be compared to the author’s situation.
35


Does the author reference any historic instances that he or she claims are similar to the one
being discussed?
What details about this historic situation help the author’s argument?
Prolepsis – Anticipating the opposition’s best argument and addressing it in advance.
 Readers interact with the texts they read, and often that interaction includes disagreement or
asking questions of the text.
 Authors can counter disagreement by answering anticipating the opposition and introducing it
within the text. Authors then respond to it.
Process analysis: Explains to the reader how to do something or how something happens.
 Were any portions of the text more clear because concrete directions about a certain process
were included?
 How does this help the author develop the argument?
Rhetorical question – A question designed to have one correct answer. The author leads you into a
position rather than stating it explicitly.
 What is the most obvious answer to this question?
 Why is it important to have the reader answer this question? How does it help the author
persuade the audience?
Transitional questions – Lead the reader into a new subject area or area of argument.
 What role do these questions play? How do these questions lead the direction of the
argument?
 How is this helpful for the reader?
Structure and Organization
It is important to consider the organization of information and strategies in any text.
 How does this structure or organization help strength the argument?
 What headings or titles does the author use? How do these strengthen the argument?
Some elements of structure to consider:
Type of Organization:
 Topical: The argument is organized according to subtopics, like describing a baby’s bubble bath first
in terms of the soap used, then the water conditions, and lastly the type of towels.
 Chronological: The argument is organized to describe information in time order, like a baseball
game from the first pitch to the last at-bat.
 Spatial: The argument follows a visual direction, such as describing a house from the inside to the
outside, or a person from their head down to their toes.
 Problem – Solution: The argument presents a problem and a possible solution, such as making
coffee at home to avoid spending extra money.
 Cause and effect: Describes the relationship between the cause or catalyst of an event and the
effect, like identifying over-consumption of candy as the cause of tooth decay.
Logical Order of Information:
36

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


Inductive: Moving from one specific example to draw a general conclusion.
Deductive: Moving from a generalized theory or assumption to decide the causes or characteristics
of a specific example or event.
Linear: The argument is told in linear order, scaffolding information or reasoning.
Circular: Supporting the argument using assumptions or information from the argument itself.
Recursive: The text consistently moves forward but circles back on specific points in the process.
*Portions of this modified from “Rhetorical Strategies for Essay Writing,” http://www.nvcc.edu/home/lshulman/rhetoric.htm
37
Aristotelian Appeals: Logos, Ethos, and Pathos
Whenever you read an argument, ask yourself, “Is this persuasive? Why?” There are many ways to
appeal to an audience. Among them are appealing to logos, ethos, and pathos. These appeals are
identifiable in almost all arguments.
To Appeal to LOGOS
(logic, reasoning)
: the argument itself; the
reasoning the author uses; logical
evidence
Types of LOGOS Appeals

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Theories/scientific facts
Indicated meanings or
reasons (because…)
Literal or historical
analogies
Definitions
Factual data & statistics
Quotations
Citations from experts &
authorities
Informed opinions
Examples (real life
examples)
Personal anecdotes
Effect on Audience
Evokes a cognitive, rational
response. Readers get a sense of,
“Oh, that makes sense” or “Hmm,
that really doesn’t prove
anything.”
To Develop ETHOS
(character, ethics)
: how an author builds credibility
& trustworthiness
Ways to Develop ETHOS

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Author’s profession/
background
Author’s publication
Appearing sincere, fair
minded, knowledgeable
Conceding to opposition
where appropriate
Morally/ethically likeable
Appropriate language for
audience and subject
Appropriate vocabulary
Correct grammar
Professional format
Knowledgeable
Effect on Audience
Helps reader to see the author as
reliable, trustworthy, competent,
and credible. The reader might
respect the author or his/her
views.
How to Talk About It
How to Talk About It
The author appeals to logos by
defining relevant terms and then
supports his claim with numerous
citations from authorities.
Through his use of scientific
terminology, the author builds his
ethos by demonstrating expertise.
The author’s use of statistics and
expert testimony are very
convincing logos appeals.
The author’s ethos is effectively
developed as readers see that he is
sympathetic to the struggles
minorities face.
38
To Appeal to PATHOS
(emotion)
: words or passages an author uses
to activate audience emotions
Types of PATHOS Appeals

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Emotionally loaded
language
Vivid descriptions
Emotional examples
Anecdotes, testimonies, or
narratives about
emotional experiences or
events
Figurative language
Emotional tone (humor,
sarcasm, disappointment,
excitement, etc.)
Effect on Audience
Evokes an emotional response.
Persuasion by emotion.
(usually evoking fear, sympathy,
empathy, anger,)
How to Talk About It
When referencing 9/11, the
author is appealing to pathos.
Here, he is eliciting both sadness
and anger from his readers.
The author’s description of the
child with cancer was a very
persuasive appeal to pathos.
How Strategies Construct Logos/Ethos/Pathos
Strategies that Appeal to Logos
Cause and Effect Analysis: This strategy analyzes why something happened and describes the
consequences of a string of events. Where in the text does the author describe events through cause
and effect? What is the cause? What is the effect? Why would the author want to demonstrate a
causal relationship between two events? Why would the audience be concerned with the
consequences the author describes? How does this strategy further the author’s claim?
Comparison and Contrast: This strategy discusses similarities and differences. Where in the text does
the author discuss two related subjects? What are the similarities? What are the differences? Why
would the author need to establish these distinctions? Why would these similarities and differences
matter to the audience? How does this strategy further the author’s claim?
Process Analysis: This strategy explains how to do something or how something happens. Where in the
text does the author explain how a series of steps achieve a specific outcome? What are these steps?
What is the outcome? Why would the author need to explain these steps? Why would this process
matter to the audience? How does this strategy further the author’s claim?
Analogy: This strategy compares between two things, typically on the basis of their structure and for the
purpose of explanation or clarification. Where in the text does the author compare one thing in relation
to another? What are the two things? How does the author demonstrate their similarity? Why would
the author need to compare these two things? How would this comparison clarify the something for the
audience? How does this strategy further the author’s claim?
Example Topic Sentence: Carr appeals to logos through the strategy of cause and effect analysis.
Strategies that Appeal to Ethos
Authoritative Quotation: This strategy is often a quotation from a famous person, well-known
authority, specialized expert, or exemplary individual. Why would the author quote this person? What
does it reveal about who the author is? What does it reveal about who the audience is? Why would
quoting this person be effective for this audience? What in the actual quote would the audience find
authoritative? How does this strategy further the author’s claim?
Prolepsis: This strategy is the anticipation and answering of possible objections. What is the possible
objection? Why would the author need to address it? What is the answer that the author provides?
How well does the author answer it? What does this answer reveal about the author’s character? Why
might a skeptical audience be or not be persuaded by this answer? How does this strategy further the
author’s claim?
Example Topic Sentence: Carr develops his ethos through the strategy of prolepsis.
Strategies that Appeal to Pathos
Motive: This strategy accuses someone or something of having a hidden agenda for doing something; it
creates an “us” and “them.” The motive the author accuses this other party of having is usually negative
and harmful (although it could be positive and altruistic). Where in the text does the author suggest
that someone or something has a hidden or harmful motivation? What is this motive? Why is it
39
harmful? Why would the audience be concerned about this motive? How does fear play a role in the
audience’s acceptance of a claim provided by the author?
Description and Narration: This is a strategy that provides a detailed sensory description or recounting
of a person, place, experience, or event. This strategy usually creates a feeling of connection between
the audience and the thing described or recounted. What does the author vividly describe or recount?
Why would the author use this strategy? What in the description or narration would the audience
connect with? How would this connection help the author advance a claim?
Metaphor and Simile: This strategy is a short comparison between two things that relies on the
audience to fill in the connection between the two things. (In an analogy, the author makes the
connections more apparent.) This strategy usually reframes the relationship in order to provoke a
response in the audience. Where in the text does the author use a metaphor or simile? What two
things are being compared? What in this comparison provokes an emotion in the audience? How does
this comparison frame the audience’s understanding of the argument? How does this metaphor or
simile further a claim made by the author?
Example Topic Sentence: Carr appeals to pathos through the strategy of motive.
Strategies that Appeal to both Ethos and Pathos
Commonplaces (values of the audience): This strategy is works on an assumption, an unsupported
claim, based on the values, ideals, fears, or prejudices of the audience. These typically take the form of
an evaluative claim with little supporting evidence that connects to the audience’s hidden beliefs and
ideologies. Where in the text does the author make a claim about values and beliefs? What is the ideal
or prejudice embedded in this claim? What does this value or belief reveal about the author? What
does it reveal about the audience? Why would claims about beliefs need less supporting evidence?
Identification: This strategy associates and connects the author with the audience, in which the author
attempts to demonstrate that he or she shares common values, experiences, beliefs, fears, or
aspirations with the audience. It can also connect the audience with someone or thing else other than
the author. Where in the text does the author build a connection with the audience? What values,
experiences, or beliefs is this connection based on? Why would the audience have a connection to
these beliefs or experiences? Does the author use any personal pronouns that would make the
audience feel this connection? How does this connection help the author’s claim seem more
persuasive?
Metadiscourse: This strategy signals the author’s role in relation to the argument and to the audience.
As an appeal to ethos, metadiscourse can create the voice of the author and reveal who he or she is. In
what ways is the author explicit about his or her purpose and position? What values does it reveal?
How does help the audience understand and connect with specific claims? As a pathos appeal,
metadiscourse can make the audience feel more or less connected to the author. Does the author
create connections with the audience through the use of personal pronouns, or the description of
common values and experiences? What emotions might this elicit from the audience. How would this
further the author’s claim?
Example Topic Sentence: Carr develops his ethos through the strategy of identification.
Or: Carr appeals to pathos through the strategy of identification.
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Group Work: Identifying Strategies
[Matt: So after reviewing the appeals and beginning Carr's text, I am assigning each student one strategy to write
about for homework over the weekend. This is my signup sheet with directions. I will use two sheets, twelve
strategies for twenty-four students. This way students will have a partner to discuss and present what they found,
ideally of course. This activity is definitely inspired by Natalie's discussion board. I have no idea how this will
translate in my class, but hopefully it will focus their attention on at least one strategy and produce writing.]
Find a place in Carr’s text where he uses one of these strategies. Write a paragraph using textual
support, analyzing 1) how this strategy works, 2) why he uses it, 3) what its effect on the audience is, 4)
what Aristotelian Appeal it is most connected to, and 5) how it furthers his central claim. For help with
strategies see the Course Reader pages 67-71.
Analogy: ______________________________
Cause and Effect Analysis: ______________________________
Comparison and Contrast: ______________________________
Process Analysis: ______________________________
Authoritative Quotation: ______________________________
Commonplaces (assumptions about values or beliefs): ______________________________
Identification: ______________________________
Prolepsis: ______________________________
Motive: ______________________________
Description and Narration: ______________________________
Metaphor and Simile: ______________________________
Metadiscourse: ______________________________
41
Carr Excerpts for Analysis
Authority Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging
on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television
was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of
thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a
developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and
Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by
the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for
the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and
complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere
decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form
when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
■ Find the claims, concession and appeal to authority.
■ Can you think of any counterexamples? (How might Thompson respond?) Any critical questions?
■ What strategies do you see?
■ Nietzsche’s Typewriter – what do you notice about this evidence?
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be
precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and
painful, often bringing on crushing headaches…But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of
Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had
become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new
idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language
often depend on the quality of pen and paper.” “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment
takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media
scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to
puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
Analogies 1:As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the
tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the
qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century,
provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis
Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in
an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided
time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it
also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976
book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world
that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of
the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed
constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our
senses and started obeying the clock.
■ How does this analogy work? Can you think of any counterexamples? Any critical questions?
■ how successful is it?
Analogy 2 – Taylorism: About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest
young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in
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Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s
machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to
work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the
operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then
testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an
“algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled
about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the
factory’s productivity soared…. Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of
industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software
coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as
well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and
manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best
method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as
“knowledge work.”
Carr Charting Exercise: What/How/Why (Mercedes)
WHAT?
HOW?
WHY?
What is the gist of what Carr is saying
How is the information relayed? How does
this strategy affect the argument?
Why is this
claim/strategy
significant/affective?
The Atlantic
A Space Odyssey – 2001
 Before: I used to do deep
reading, now my mind wanders


Now: I am increasingly
reliant/active on the internet
The internet is great! – I <3
Internet
Internet changes our cognitive
process (“concentration and
contemplation”)
Tone: humorous “My mind isn’t going—
so far as I can tell”
Personal example of his experience with
challenging texts versus his struggle to
concentrate now.
Ethos: “searching, and surfing and
sometimes adding to the great
databases…”
Prolepsis: applaud the benefits of
internet
 Clive Thompson
 Marshall McLuhan
Metaphoric language: “Once I was a
scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I
zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet
Ski.”
I’m not the only one having this issue;
lots of other smart people share my
view:
Personal Testimonies from credible
sources:
 Online media blogger & U of
Michigan pathologist.
o Scott Karp
43
I don’t expect you to be persuaded by
anecdotes alone, so here are some
scientific data.

We are reading more, but new
“online” reading is a) Different &
b) less valuable
The medium of communication can
alter the communication itself
We are intellectually susceptible and
affected by the systems we adopt
 New technologies can distance us
from meaningful experiences
o Change in habits
o Psychological/linguistic
change
o Biological/cognitive
change
We have consolidated our resources
and have become too dependent on
the internet, thereby losing
perspective and cognitive ability.
o Bruce Friedman
Prolepsis:
 Long-term neuro/psych experiment
will be the definitive proof
 Study of online research habits
proves: skimming/bouncing
habits=less reading
o “Power browse”
Binary: Maryanne Wolf-Developmental
Psychologist @ Tufts U.: Efficiency &
immediacy privileged over deep
interpretation
Nietzche’s typewriter:
Saved him by allowing him to continue
writing, but his writing was no longer
the same.
Appeal to authority:
 James Olds-Prof. neuroscience @
GMU
 Daniel Bell-Sociologist
 Mechanical clock
o Lewis Mumford-Historian
o Joseph Weizenbaun
o Alan Turing
Cause/Effect
The internet, exist in and promotes,
an environment of overstimulation
and scattered attention
 Any outlet accessed through the
media will have no choice but to
conform to the internet
standards of information
consumption
Industrial revolution philosophy
embodied by Taylor (system
efficiency before individual labor) is
the same philosophy that fuels the
internet; both are searching for a
singular, most efficient way to
conduct “Knowledge work”
Examples:
Tv, magazine, newspaper…
 Tom Bodkin –NYT efficient news
‘abstracts’
Well-funded, intelligent techies
Sarcasm:
Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “system” at
Midvale Steel plant
Compared with
Google headquarters
 “Utopia of perfect efficiency”
 Eric Schmidt
 Taylorism
44
naturally want to conduct more
research because they believe that
more technology will always equal
more value for society, but what the
heck is intelligence about anyway?
The companies that encourage our
endless use of the internet have
ulterior (financial) motives.
Others have feared change before; I
could be wrong …. Or maybe not!
“Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf
argues, is indistinguishable from deep
thinking.”
Quickly accessible content is not a
replacement for dense
cultural/intellectual thought
“Ambiguity is not an opening for insight
but a bug to be fixed. The human brain
is just an outdated computer that needs
a faster processor and a bigger hard
drive.”
Prolepsis:
Socrates’ concerns regarding writing
replacing knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus
Appeal to Authority:
Compares himself to Socrates!
Example of Gutenberg Printing Press
Richard Foreman:
“Pancake people”
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Sample Rhetorical Strategy Papers
Sometimes it’s helpful to take a look at how other students write about strategies. Here are
some excerpts from papers that analyze rhetorical strategies in Rifkin’s “A Change of Heart
about Animals.”
Rhetorical Analysis of Rifkin’s use of Rebuttals
In “A Change of Heart About Animals,” a 2003 editorial published in the Los Angeles Times,
Jeremy Rifkin argues that new research calls into question many of the boundaries commonly
thought to exist between humans and other animals, and as a consequence humans should
expand their empathy for animals and treat them better. To support this argument Rifkin
points to studies suggesting that animals can acquire language, use tools, exhibit selfawareness, anticipate death, and pass on knowledge from one generation to the next. One
strategy Rifkin employs to persuade his readers is to describe some of the most common
objections typically raised against the idea that animals and humans share essential traits, along
with rebuttals to these objections. For example, Rifkin notes that “philosophers and animal
behaviorists have long argued that other animals are not capable of self-awareness because they
lack a sense of individualism.” He acknowledges that “scientists have long believed” that unlike
humans, animals cannot comprehend their death, and that “until very recently” scientists
assumed animal behavior was based on instinct rather than learned experience. Rifkin responds
to these objections, presenting counter evidence and counter claims based on new studies that
he suggests undermine previous understandings of animals.
This is an important strategy, for Rifkin likely knows that many of his readers come to his
article assuming that fundamental differences exist between humans and animals, and when
presented with an argument suggesting otherwise, would raise precisely the objections Rifkin
describes. By making objections to his argument a prominent part of his text, and spending so
much space responding to them, Rifkin is better able to win over his audience. Dealing with
common assumptions and objections to his position is crucial to getting his audience to accept
his main argument. It removes what would otherwise be a major obstacle to his audience
accepting his claims. If he did not include this strategy, it is likely that these objections would
occur to many readers, and they might reject his argument. Spending so much time considering
opposing points of view also makes Rifkin appear balanced and fair minded, and thus may
incline readers to trust him. Lastly, the way Rifkin presents objections to his argument is
important strategically. Rifkin presents opposing views almost exclusively in terms of “past
research” that has been superseded by more up to date work. It seems likely that some
contemporary research exists that is at odds with Rifkin’s position, yet Rifkin does not discuss
this, instead presenting disagreement in terms of old, outdated studies versus new, correct
ones. Since many readers are likely to assume that the more up to date scientific research is, the
more likely it is to be true, then associating objections with past research increases the
likelihood they are seen as invalid.
Rhetorical Analysis of Rifkin’s Word Choice
One strategy Rifkin employs to build the argument that animals should be treated more like
humans is his subtle use of animal names when introducing data. When he offers new research
about the problem solving abilities of New Caledonian crows, for example, Rifkin cleverly
describes how “Abel, the more dominant male…stole Betty’s hook” in order to obtain a better
feeding tool. Rifkin, of course, could have chosen to ignore the bird’s test-subject names –
which in all likelihood, were arbitrarily assigned by lab technicians and remain of little
46
importance to the conclusions of the experiment – but by including them he bestows a human
quality to the animals beyond what the data suggests. He repeats this technique twice more to
the same effect, once when introducing “Koko, the 300 pound gorilla,” who displays close-tohuman intelligence and an impressive sign language vocabulary, and again when describing an
“Orangutan named Chantek,” whose use of a mirror displays human-like self awareness. Surely
the data alone make the argument that animals are, by turns, capable of human qualities of
problem-solving, communication, learning, and self-awareness. By offering the names of the
test animals, though, he imbues them with greater individuality, personality and dignity.
Giving the animals human names invites readers to think of them in terms usually reserved
only for human beings. This strategy establishes a relationship of similarity between the
animals mentioned and ourselves. The more human animals seem, the more it follows that they
should be treated with the empathy and dignity we assume all humans deserve. This strategy
thus helps advance Rifkin’s claim that we should “expand and deepen our empathy to include
the broader community of creatures with whom we share the earth.”
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The Rhetorical Strategy of Metadiscourse
Many forms of academic writing utilize metadiscourse. These are moments in the text
when the author explicitly TELLS you how to interpret her words.



In academic texts, metadiscourse occurs when the author stops arguing, stands
back and tells you how to interpret the argument.
In this moment, the author reflects on what he or she is saying. This may involve
making explicit the strategies (the strategy of explaining a strategy).
Metadiscourse is similar to the project statement or thesis in your papers.
Practicing writing metadiscourse is useful. It helps you develop your ideas, generate
more text, and get a better sense of both your paper’s structure and how you might
change direction.
In clarifying things for your reader, you also clarify things for yourself. Gerald Graff
describes the way this works in his article, “How to Write an Argument: What Students
and Teachers Really Need to Know,” found in this reader. For specific examples, see They
Say/I Say p. 126-30.
Authors use metadiscourse to:
1. Ward off potential misunderstandings.
2. Anticipate and respond to objections.
3. Orient the reader by providing a “map”– where the argument is going,
where it has gone, etc.
4. Forecast & review structure and purpose
5. Qualify the nature, scope or extent of an argument
6. Alert readers to an elaboration of a previous idea.
7. Move from a general claim to a specific example.
8. Indicate that a claim is especially important
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Examples of Metadiscourse from Amusing Ourselves to Death
Neil Postman, media theorist and professor of media ecology at New York University, utilized
metadiscourse throughout his academic writing.
In this example of metadiscourse from his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in
the Age of Show Business, you can see how metadiscourse might work in your own essays.
It is my intention in this book to show that a great . . . shift has taken place in
America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become
dangerous nonsense.
In this example, Postman outlines both the project and the purpose of his book.
With this in view, my task in the chapters ahead is straightforward. I must, first,
demonstrate how, under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America
was different from what it is now – generally coherent, serious and rational; and then
how, under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd.
Here, the he forecasts the organization of the arguments and maps out what will happen in the
book.
But to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as standard-brand
academic whimpering, a kind of elitist complaint against “junk” on television, I must
first explain that . . . I appreciate junk as much as the next fellow, and I know full
well that the printing press has generated enough of it to fill the grand canyon to
overflowing. Television is not old enough to have matched printing’s output of junk.
First, Postman clarifies what he is about to do, and then he identifies anticipated objections to
his argument. Next, he deals with the objection and once again clarifies his position.
49
Sample Body Paragraphs Analyzing Carr
Carr employs one of the Aristotelian Appeals, ethos, in this text. Through his use of word choice and
prolepsis, he creates an air of creditability and builds his character up for the audience. He
establishes himself as trustworthy and knowledgeable. Ultimately this makes Carr’s argument more valid
and believable. His use of an anecdote in the beginning of his text as well makes him a more personable
author. The first rhetorical strategy mentioned, word choice, is a subdued, but very powerful strategy if used
correctly. Carr has the ability to form, or guide, our opinions simply by the words he uses and how he
defines them to us readers. Authors like Carr can choose to simply provide a denotative definition, straight
from the dictionary, or a personal and connotative definition that subtly shifts the meaning closer to what
the author chooses. This strategy is evident when Carr defines the Internet. “The Internet is a machine
designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its
legions of programmers are intent on finding the ‘one best method’– the perfect algorithm — to carry out
every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as ‘knowledge work,’ (5). By using words like
“manipulation of information” and “legions of programmers” it affects the way readers interpret ideas and
the words being defined. In this case, you can tell that Carr is strategically picking words that have a
negative, and almost chilling connotation to them. This is effective in many ways for some authors. But for
me it seems as though Carr is exaggerating the definition of “Internet” so much to the point that it is no
longer believable or genuine, but rather cunning, and in some ways devious. Carr also uses the strategy of
prolepsis, or the anticipation and rebuttal of possible counter-arguments, to establish ethos in his writing.
This technique of raising an objection then immediately dismissing or answering it creates a strong defense
for Carr’s own argument. When Carr includes a personal story right away at the beginning of the text, it does
not have as much of an impact in changing the minds of the readers, most who love the internet and the
advantages it gives us, nor their opinions of the internet. “Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still
await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how
Internet us affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by
scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the
way we read and think,” (2). Carr anticipates the opposing thoughts of critics on the use of an anecdote to
justify his opinion on the internet. By Carr utilizing prolepsis, the critics disapproval of his use of an anecdote
to set up an argument is almost irrelevant to readers and those hesitant of his first claim. Prolepsis is not
just used when a new claim or argument is introduced in a text. Carr also exercises the strategy of prolepsis
toward the end of his text, as though he is trying to “stick it” to his critics by having the last word. “Maybe
I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a counter tendency
to expect the worst of every new tool or medium,” (6). Carr places himself in a position of someone who
would refute Carr’s argument altogether. By acknowledging this possible error in his argument, he gains
respect and creditability from the audience because he is aware of possible flaws in his own argument. But
because he is using the strategy of prolepsis, he quickly turns it around as he explains how Socrates, one of
the great Greek philosophers, was hesitant to accept new technology in his time as well. This new
technology just happened to be the development of writing. “Socrates wasn’t wrong– the new technology
did often have the effects he feared– but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t force the many ways that writing
and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not
50
wisdom)” (6). Including the fact that Socrates did not predict the good parts that the effects of reading and
writing had on humans does not help his defense of his argument that the internet is all bad. It takes his
own argument a step back, which is not a positive ending to the text for Carr.
A notable strategy that reoccurs in Carr’s text is the use of analogies and figurative language such as
metaphors and similes. The use of short story excerpts and phrases creates a sense of relatability as well as
demonstrates his intricate claims in a simplistic way. The most apparent analogy that Carr uses in his text is
the very first section of his journal in which he compares a super computer known as HAL being
disconnected and terminated from Stanley Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey to the deconstruction of the mind due
to the internet. The use of this example indicates the adverse changes in people’s ability to perform caused
by the internet. Apparently, the internet is preventing people from reaching their full potential in their
ability to read, think, and memorize information. The question is, why is this analogy significant at all or why
is it needed? Carr uses it for a number of reasons all of which tie into the main argument of his journal. The
analogy acts as an attention getter for the reader and forms an interesting, yet mysterious and thought
provoking introduction to the text. Obviously, a good attention grabber is key for any rhetoric as it is how
the author influences people to become aware and interested in what they are arguing. Another aspect of
this analogy is that it is an exaggerated form of the argument that Carr is trying to make. Carr describes an
association between the super computer HAL having its internal power core dismanteled piece by piece and
the internet causing people’s minds to become deconstructed. By making a statement such as this, Carr
suggests that the internet essentially results in brain death. The use of exaggeration or extremity can be an
effective way of conveying an argument because it establishes a sense of caution and danger for the public
and opens people’s eyes to understanding the severity of the argument he is trying to make. Moreover,
Carr uses figurative language to connect his main claims to the overall argument that the internet limits
deep thought and is negatively changing the way people think, read, and memorize. Carr’s use of similes is
seen when he states, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on
a Jet Ski” (2). Thus, Carr demonstrates the idea that the internet has caused people to skim and briefly read
information instead of deeply and critically thinking about what they see. In other words, the internet has
increasingly influenced people to not think as deeply into subject. The simile is effective because it is clear
that it is faster to Jet Ski than it is scuba dive; the word “zip” indicates quickness or speed meaning that the
internet encourages people to “zip” through information by only touching upon the mere exterior or surface
of the topic. Although the simile is effective in translating the idea that Carr is trying to convey, it is not as
strong as it could be. The basis of the claim that he is trying to make derives from his own personal
experiences that his own mind is acting in this way. It is definitely questionable if this claim is strongly
supported by his use of figurative language
Sample Draft Carr Paper
Introduction: In the last 30 years, a wave of technological innovation has swept over the Earth,
blanketing our cultures with Cell Phones, Microwaves, and the peculiar creation labeled simply,
“The Internet”. Emerging to the public in the 1990’s, the Internet is a vast collection of
databases stored all around the world, allowing anyone with a computer and access to the
51
internet to view virtually anything you might want to learn about. However, even in its early age,
the Internet displayed curious properties, as popular tech-cartoonist Scott Adams states,” In
1993, there were only a handful of Web sites you could access, such as the Smithsonian’s exhibit
of gems. These pages were slow to load and crashed as often as they worked. But something
interesting happened every time we demonstrated this technology. The customers would get out
of their chairs, their eyes like saucers…There was something about the internet that was like
catnip.”(Adams, 1054) Today the internet has ballooned into a juggernaut of political activism,
commercial business, and in some cases, controversy. In his 2008 article entitled,” Is Google
Making Us Stupid?”, writer Nicholas Carr taps into the undercurrent of a current global debate
regarding beliefs that the Internet has begun to change our world in more ways, than simply
opening more information to the general public. As Carr asserts, the Internet has begun to
negatively effect our very way of thinking, from distractions in online articles, to creating
negative effects upon user’s concentration. In this paper, I will analyze the rhetorical strategies
employed by Carr to promote his main argument, to argue that Carr creates a very persuasive
point even if his views may be considered a minority opinion.
Body paragraph 1: One of the most important tools Carr utilizes in his article is the rhetorical
strategy of Prolepsis, a rhetorical tactic of addressing possible arguments against his position in
advance. From the very start of his article, Carr finds himself in a hard position arguing against
the internet’s benefits, as 90% of the public polled by Pew research found,” the Internet has been
a good thing for them personally.”(NBC, 2014) If Carr is to provide a strong argument, he must
attempt to address any counter-claim his audience might find with any of his views. While this is
not possible for every point he makes, Carr makes a strong effort throughout his article to add a
section of Prolepsis to his statements. As an example, in a short section regarding an emerging
trend of “skimming” rather than fully reading an article on the internet, Carr provides the
following assertion:
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the internet, not to mention the popularity of text messaging on
cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970’s or 1980’s…But it’s a
different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking-perhaps even a new sense
of self (Carr, 3)
By utilizing Prolepsis here, Carr is attempting to prevent his argument from being countered by
the referenced facts regarding the wide volume of text read on the internet. Failing to address
these benefits to the internet would open Carr immediately to criticism from other writers, such
as Clive Thompson, a writer mentioned early in Carr’s text who wrote his own book detailing the
benefits of the internet. In the same light, Carr also urges the reader to be, “Skeptical of his
skepticism”(Carr, 63) while referencing the negative reactions of Socrates and the humanist
Squarciafico respectively, to the invention of written language and the printing press. This might
seem to be a bad tactic, as the last move Carr wants to take would be one inclined to set his
readers against his claims. Yet his use of these historical examples with his own personal
statement serves to deflect the possible assertions against his argument from history by merely
stating that he knows he could be wrong. However, he is at the same time associating himself
with the great minds of antiquity, those who made assertions that the newest technologies would
change the way we thought and lived, claims that NYU professor Clay Shirky states as, “Correct,
even prescient”.(Carr,63) While Carr does provide many good examples of Prolepsis, this is not
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to say that Carr creates an absolute defense, as even in the quote above, he fails to mention other
aspects of the internet’s effects such as the internet’s effect on writing, something Thompson
goes into great detail over, leaving a weakness open in his argument. Additionally, Carr could
use more evidence for some of his uses of Prolepsis, as even in his section rebutting a very short
section from Thompson, “Thompson has written,”[The Internet] can be an enormous boon to
thinking.” But that boon comes at a price”(Carr, 2), he relies on a personal view, rather than
evidence. However, despite the deficiencies of parts of his defense, Prolepsis is key to Carr’s
main argument, in that if he cannot defend the weak parts of his article and at the same time
force his audience to face the possibility of side effects in the commonly believed “benefits” of
the internet. His whole argument will fall apart under the scrutiny of a group that most likely
does not want to find something as key to their lives as the Internet, as a possible source of
problems.[….]
Body paragraph 2:In the course of making the claim that the Internet is not as beneficial as
traditional methods of reading, and absorbing information, Carr carefully selects the definitions
for critical terms in his article. Doing this allows Carr the ability to change the meaning of
common terms like reading, and algorithms in his view of the internet. As an example of this,
Carr’s statement,” The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is
valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the authors words but for the intellectual
vibrations those words set off within our own minds… Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues,
is indistinguishable from Deep thinking.”(Carr, 7) Carr clearly is establishing a difference
between the reading done online, and the traditional printed page. By defining these two as
separate actions, Carr is able to relegate the internet’s version of reading as substandard to the
traditional method. This in turn, allows Carr to assert to his audience that the terms they are
comfortable with, like reading, are not universally applicable. Additionally, Carr redefines terms
like “algorithms”, and “processes”, to hold a more negative connotation to connect Google’s
plans to, “systematize everything”(Carr,5) back to the slavish work conditions of the Industrial
age pioneered by A. Winslow Taylor, one of the founders of Factory systemization. (Carr, 5)
Carr’s argument benefits from this in that he is able to redefine one of the Internets highest
regarded institutions as, “something making its users, “into little more than Automatons””, (Carr,
5) A point that ties in well with his overall argument that the internet is harming our critical
thinking faculties, and ruining our traditional abilities to process information.
Conclusion and Evaluation: The end result of Carr’s strategies and evidence should produce a
favorable opinion in the minds of his audience, yet while I found his strategies persuasive, I also
found some aspects of his article somewhat weak. Of these, a few of Carr’s rebuttals fall short
among his other great uses of Prolepsis. In one case, Carr glances off a quote from writer Clive
Thompson, rebutting his claim of internet boons by simply saying, “But this boon comes at a
price”(Carr, 59) Additionally, his evidence for any negative effects in this example is limited to
his own personal experiences, and like in a court of law, using yourself as an example is not
good evidence. This is not to say that overall Carr’s uses of Prolepsis are flawed, perhaps the
most valuable lesson I have learned from Carr’s article would be the importance of anticipating
arguments against your claims. Carr makes a strong showing of this throughout his article, and to
me, this makes the difference for his in places, weak, claims. Without his uses of Prolepsis, the
official name for this strategy, even his introductory anecdotes would have faltered early due to
their personal nature. Lastly, Carr also shows as an example of an opinion that is in a very
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minute minority, yet through the exemplary use of rhetorical tactics, still manages to hold a
persuasive point, in that, Carr is a success in his argument.
Adams, Scott. “The Modern Era: 2001-2008.” Introduction. Dilbert 2.0 20 Years of
Dilbert. Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Pub., 2012. 1054. Print.
Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company,
01 July 2008. Web. 08 Nov. 2014.
<http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-usstupid/306868/&gt;.
Wagstaff, Keith. “Poll: 90 Percent of Americans Think Internet Is Good For Them – NBC
News.” NBC News. Pew Research, 27 Feb. 2014. Web. 09 Nov. 2014.
<http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/poll-90-percent-americans-think-internet-goodthem-n40111&gt;.
Freewrite
a) how is my paper going? Which parts am I happiest with?
b) which sections are proving the toughest?
c) what would I like help with?
TIPS & GUIDELINES
Introduction: In your introduction, describe the larger conversation to which Carr is responding
and its significance (why we should care); introduce his text and overall argument; provide your
own evaluative thesis about whether or not Carr’s argument is persuasive, and provide a
roadmap for how your paper will proceed.
Body Paragraphs: Analyze three rhetorical strategies drawn on by Carr. You should discuss at
least one of the three Aristotelian Appeals (logos, ethos, & pathos), connecting each to a set of
specific rhetorical moves and choices. For example, if you are discussing ethos, you may wish to
consider things like word choice, rebuttals, how the reader is addressed, evidence presented, etc.
You should also examine two other strategies (see materials on wiki page for Carr). These can be
Aristotelian appeals, or other strategies. In each case you will provide 1) at least one textual
example, in order to analyze and evaluate, and explain 2) how the strategy works, 3) why Carr
specifically uses this strategy to advance his argument, 4) what the effect is on his intended
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audience, and 5) how well it furthers his central claim. For one of the strategies, you should also
evaluate 6) how effectively Carr uses this strategy (strengths and weaknesses).
Conclusion: In the conclusion present your response to Carr’s argument. You can also discuss
lessons you draw from analyzing Carr’s strategies – what did writing the paper reveal to you
about his argument, or arguments more generally?
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Evaluation
Style and Syntax as Strategy: Close Reading Tips
Exercise: Read Rockmore’s “How Texas Teaches History” (see below). She claims grammatical
choices can involve “moral choices” (and I would add “rhetorical choices”). Use this to begin
thinking about Carr’s use of grammar.
Some Questions to Consider When Reading a Text
1. Agency – who is the primary actor, what are they doing, and to whom? How is agency constructed
through grammar, tense, syntax, foregrounding/backgrounding, use of nominalization, etc.
2. Story/Narrative - How are objects and events emplotted? Who/what is the main character, event,
objects? What point of view is provided? What larger cultural narratives are drawn on?
3. Subject positions - How are pronouns, categories, forms of address, grammar, etc. used to establish
subject positions, participant positions and roles, patterns of identification, power relations, etc.
4. Categories, terms and definitions – what perspective, values and assumptions are built in?
5. Word Choice - How word choice constructs ethos, authority, patterns of identification, etc.
6. Point of View/Perspective
The Significance of Metaphor
“Are we not coming to see that the whole works of scientific research, even entire schools, are hardly
more than the patient repetition, in all its ramifications, of a fertile metaphor?” Kenneth Burke.
Manipulated by Metaphors? Lera Boroditsky, UCSD professor of cognitive science has written about the
effect of figurative language, particularly metaphors of space and time, on reasoning. One paper
claimed that substituting just one word in a text about a crime wave ravaging an imaginary town –
comparing crime to a “beast” instead of a “virus” – changed how readers responded to the problem.
People who read that crime was a beast were more likely to advocate putting more police on the streets
or locking up criminals; people who read “virus” were far more likely to push for education and social
reforms. And yet, when people cited the factors behind their decisions, no one mentioned the
metaphor. “People love to think that they’re being rational, and all of us love to think that we’re basing
our opinion entirely on facts. But in fact it was the metaphor that people overlooked.”
Our language is full of “metaphorical mappings” from one semantic domain to another. In other words,
we constantly use clusters of words from one “domain” to talk about other domains – in fact we do it so
much that these relationships can become naturalized, and we no longer think of this as the use of
figurative language. Examining how metaphors work can tell us much about culture and ideology, and
help us read texts more carefully.
How do these metaphors reveal cultural assumptions?
1. Spatial Metaphors “The foot of the bed, the foot of the hill, the back of the house, the face of the
mountain, the leg of the chair, the skin of the orange, the teeth of the comb, etc.
2. Metaphors for Arguments “Your claims are indefensible…I attacked the weak points in his
argument…She couldn’t counter my criticisms…his criticisms were on target…she won the argument…his
position is strong…his argument lacked support”
3. Knowledge & Understanding: “I see what you are saying (cf. “savoir” in French). She showed great
insight. My view of this issue is…what is your outlook on the problem? The concept was clear to her. “
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4. Life/Career: “He saw no way of getting ahead. He felt he was falling behind. Where do you want to be in 5
years? His career path was working out well. She felt her life was finally on the right track. He was
approaching his forties. Things were going well (note how the auxiliary verb “go” is often used to indicate the
future, as in “I’m going to be a lawyer.”)
Close reading Tip: look carefully at agency, perspective, story, word choice,
definitions, & metaphor. They create “frames” that influence how we see issues
Example 1: how news headlines frame events. Read these headlines about the Supreme Court overturning
California’s referendum on medical marijuana. How do they frame the situation?
1. Salon Magazine “Court rules against pot for sick people”
2. New York Times: “Supreme Court Allows Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Users”
3. San Diego Union Tribune: “Court OKs Marijuana Crackdown”
4. L.A. Times: “Justices Give Feds Last Word on Medical Marijuana”
5. Christian News Source: “Medical Marijuana Laws Don't Shield Users From Prosecution”
(A) Armed extremists take over lodge
(B) Land grievance sparks protest
Example 2: framing actions and events
1. "An infant left sleeping in his crib was bitten repeatedly by rats while his 17-year-old mother went to
cash her welfare check."
2. "An eight-month-old South End boy was treated yesterday after being bitten by rats while sleeping in
his crib. Tenants said that repeated requests for extermination had been ignored by the landlord.
3. "Rats bit eight-month old Michael Burns five times yesterday as he napped in his crib. Burns is the
latest victim of a rat epidemic plaguing inner-city neighborhoods. A Public Health Department
spokesperson explained that federal and state cutbacks forced short-staffing at rat control and
housing inspection programs." (from Charlotte Ryan, Prime Time Activism)
Example 3: News & Gender. In The Feminist Critique of Language, Cameron examines ideology built into
two newspaper reports of an attack on a married couple. What do you notice about these two reports?
- A man who suffered head injuries when attacked by two men who broke into his home in
Beckenham, Kent early yesterday was pinned down on the bed by intruders who took it in turns
to rape his wife. Daily Telegraph.
- A terrified 19-stone husband was forced to lie next to his wife as two men raped her yesterday.
The Sun.
Extracts President Bush speech October 2001 (GWB-6/62-64). [37]
- On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country…on
September 11, this great land came under attack, and it's still under attack as we speak…Our
war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every
terrorist group has been found, stopped and defeated.
- Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our
time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us. Our nation, this generation, will lift
the dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause
by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail.
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- We are at the beginning of what I view as a very long struggle against evil. We're not fighting a
nation and we're not fighting a religion. We're fighting evil. And we have no choice but to
prevail"
Frames & Framing
Frames are constructed through the use of metaphors, definitions, narratives, categories and metalinguistic
commentary. They are used to get an audience to attend to certain elements of a situation and ignore
others; to construct a particular way of seeing an issue, event, person or group, and to shape the way an
audience understands the context of communication.
E.g. how we order the journalist’s “What, Where, Who, How, Why” creates a frame.
(1. Act 2. Scene 3. Agent 4. Agency, 5. Purpose)
Example: Katrina. How do we frame what happened? What importance do we give to the scene/context
(where it happened)? What role did the chief actors play in the event? What elements had the greatest
agency/by what means did they act? Why did they act the way they did?
2. Two ways of asking a question frame the request quite differently. You want a letter of
recommendation from a professor
Strategy 1: simply ask the professor – “will you write me a letter?” It’s likely she will agree out of
professional courtesy, regardless of how well she knows you/whether she’ll write a strong letter.
Strategy 2: Frame the question this way: “Professor, do you think you know me well enough to write
a strong letter of recommendation?” This gives the professor an “out,” and gives you some
assurance that you’ll get a positive letter. How you frame the question matters.
How Names, Categories, & Definitions Construct Frames
“Plantations” (see Rockmore). Some recent historians criticize this frequently used term. Why?
“Cash advance vs. high interest loan”
“Second Mortgage vs. Home equity loan”
“Death Tax/Estate Tax/Inheritance Tax”
“Far East, Middle East, Near East”
“War on terror,” vs. “war against Islamic extremists,” vs. “fight against Al Queda” (scope, agents,
action) and “Axis of Evil”
“War on drugs”
“Body bags vs. transfer tubes,” “civilian casualties vs. collateral damage”
“Doctor assisted suicide” vs. “death with dignity”
“Defense of marriage” vs. “marriage equality”
“Habit forming” vs. “addictive”
“Erectile dysfunction” vs. “impotence” “Halitosis” vs. “bad breath” “Male pattern baldness” vs.
“losing your hair”
“Homeland Security vs. National Security”
“The Patriot Act” – why this name for a piece of legislation? (P.A.T.R.I.O.T = “Providing Appropriate
Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act”)
The Difference Punctuation Can Make
1. A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to
keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
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2. A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to
keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
(Jefferson revised version 1, changing punctuation and turning it into version 2. But version 1 was sent out for
ratification before his changes could be included. Some historians argue version 2 can be interpreted as outlining
more restricted gun rights).
How Texas Teaches History By ELLEN BRESLER ROCKMORE. NY Times, Oct 21, 2015
A TEXAS high school student and his mother recently called attention to a curious line in a geography
textbook: a description of the Atlantic slave trade as bringing “millions of workers” to plantations in the
American South. McGraw-Hill Education, the publisher of the textbook, has since acknowledged that the
term “workers” was a misnomer.
The company’s chief executive also promised to revise the textbook so that its digital version as well as
its next edition would more accurately describe the forced migration and enslavement of Africans. In the
meantime, the company is also offering to send stickers to cover the passage.
But it will take more than that to fix the way slavery is taught in Texas textbooks. In 2010, the Texas
Board of Educationapproved a social studies curriculum that promotes capitalism and Republican
political philosophies. The curriculum guidelines prompted many concerns, including that new textbooks
would downplay slavery as the cause of the Civil War.
This fall, five million public school students in Texas began using the textbooks based on the new
guidelines. And some of these books distort history not through word choices but through a tool we
often think of as apolitical: grammar.
In September, Bobby Finger of the website Jezebel obtained and published some excerpts from the new
books, showing much of what is objectionable about their content. The books play down the horror of
slavery and even seem to claim that it had an upside. This upside took the form of a distinctive AfricanAmerican culture, in which family was central, Christianity provided “hope,” folk tales expressed “joy”
and community dances were important social events.
But it is not only the substance of the passages that is a problem. It is also their form. The writers’
decisions about how to construct sentences, about what the subject of the sentence will be, about
whether the verb will be active or passive, shape the message that slavery was not all that bad.
I teach freshman writing at Dartmouth College. My colleagues and I consistently try to convey to our
students the importance of clear writing. Among the guiding principles of clear writing are these:
Whenever possible, use human subjects, not abstract nouns; use active verbs, not passive. We don’t
want our students to write, “Torture was used,” because that sentence obscures who was torturing
whom.
In the excerpts published by Jezebel, the Texas textbooks employ all the principles of good, strong, clear
writing when talking about the “upside” of slavery. But when writing about the brutality of slavery, the
writers use all the tricks of obfuscation. You can see all this at play in the following passage from a
textbook, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, called Texas United States History:
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Some slaves reported that their masters treated them kindly. To protect their investment, some
slaveholders provided adequate food and clothing for their slaves. However, severe treatment was very
common. Whippings, brandings, and even worse torture were all part of American slavery.
Notice how in the first two sentences, the “slavery wasn’t that bad” sentences, the main subject of each
clause is a person: slaves, masters, slaveholders. What those people, especially the slave owners, are
doing is clear: They are treating their slaves kindly; they are providing adequate food and clothing. But
after those two sentences there is a change, not just in the writers’ outlook on slavery but also in their
sentence construction. There are no people in the last two sentences, only nouns. Yes, there is severe
treatment, whippings, brandings and torture. And yes, those are all bad things. But where are the slave
owners who were actually doing the whipping and branding and torturing? And where are the slaves
who were whipped, branded and tortured? They are nowhere to be found in the sentence.
In another passage, slave owners and their institutionalized cruelty are similarly absent: “Families were
often broken apart when a family member was sold to another owner.”
Note the use of the passive voice in the verbs “were broken apart” and “was sold.” If the sentence had
been written according to the principles of good draftsmanship, it would have looked like this: Slave
owners often broke slave families apart by selling a family member to another owner. A bit more
powerful, no? Through grammatical manipulation, the textbook authors obscure the role of slave
owners in the institution of slavery.
It may appear at first glance that the authors do a better job of focusing on the actions of slaves. After
all, there are many sentences in which “slaves” are the subjects, the main characters in their own
narrative. But what are the verbs in those sentences? Are the slaves suffering? No, in the sentences that
feature slaves as the subject, as the main actors in the sentence, the slaves are contributing their
agricultural knowledge to the growing Southern economy; they are singing songs and telling folk tales;
they are expressing themselves through art and dance.
There are no sentences, in these excerpts, anyway, in which slaves are doing what slaves actually did:
toiling relentlessly, without remuneration or reprieve, constantly subject to confinement, corporal
punishment and death. The textbook publishers were put in a difficult position. They had to teach
history to Texas’ children without challenging conservative political views that are at odds with history.
In doing so, they made many grammatical choices. Though we don’t always recognize it, grammatical
choices can be moral choices, and these publishers made the wrong ones.
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Notes on Fallacies & the Evaluation of Argument
Talking about ‘fallacies’ as a laundry list of forms to avoid, or as an algorithm for finding weaknesses in authors’
arguments, is not terribly useful. Instead, you can think of fallacies as a way of reflecting on the nature of chains
of reasoning, for talking about the strengths and weaknesses of argumentative claims and the evidence,
support, backing, assumptions etc. associated with them. Fallacies should get you thinking about the criteria we
use to evaluate arguments; to what extent an argument works according to a particular set of relevant criteria,
and what kinds of arguments work in particular contexts.
Most fallacies are not strange or idiosyncratic forms of argument. Often they draw on perfectly valid and
common forms of reasoning, but they do so in a way that is lacking in some respect. For example, sophisticated
arguments often contain rebuttals and counterarguments that consider opposing views. If this is done well, it
adds strength to an argument. However, if an author does not accurately represent an opponent’s argument, or
presents a weak, caricatured version of that argument, we can say s/he has committed the fallacy of creating “a
straw man.” Obviously, fallacies are matters of degree and involve interpretation and argument – you have to
make the case that evidence exists for the fallacy. Note that when considering whether an argument contains a
fallacy, you must consider questions of audience, purpose and context. Reasoning that is weak or “fallacious” in
one context may be persuasive and credible in another.
Fallacies Related to GASCAP Chains of Reasoning
Take a look at the criteria by which we evaluate the GASCAP strategies. When the criteria are not adhered to,
this may be evidence of a fallacy. For example, a “hasty generalization” may be identifiable when the scope of a
generalization is at odds with the evidence presented, or when the sufficiency, typicality, accuracy and relevance
of the evidence do not match the strength of the generalization.
1. Hasty Generalization This involves a generalization from data that is inadequate in some important way.
Usually, this means that the generalization fails the STAR test – the data on which the generalization is based
is not sufficient, typical, accurate or relevant. One of the most common ways in which data fails to be
sufficient is when the sample size is too small. For example, if I say smoking can’t be bad for people since
both my parents smoke and have lived to a ripe old age, the sample size I have based my generalization on is
absurdly small – 2 people. A “hasty generalization” may be most obvious when the scope of a generalization
is at odds with the amount of evidence presented – the stronger the generalization, the more evidence
needed. Anecdotal evidence may also indicate a hasty generalization – this sometimes indicates that the
arguer is using a small and unrepresentative (atypical) sample.
Example: “Quebec environment minister Lise Bacon pledged the PCBs would be moved out and broken
down somehow within 18 months. She also said that PCBs couldn't be all that dangerous because her father
had washed his hands in PCBs but lived to an old age.” (Merritt Clifton, "PCB Homecoming", Greenpeace,
November/December, 1989, p. 21.
2. False Analogy Analogies involve parallels or comparisons between two cases, events or situations. They
consist of comparing a specific case or example to another case or example, and reasoning that because the
two examples are alike in many ways they are also alike in one further specific way.
What is important here is the extent to which relevant similarities can be established between the two
contexts, cases, events or situations. Are there sufficient, typical, accurate, relevant similarities? If not, the
arguer may be employing a false analogy. If the analogy is based on similarities between two examples, we
need to consider whether important counterexamples exist. We also need to consider how strong the claim
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is (The stronger the claim, the tighter the analogy must be).
Example: High-density development [doesn't] reduce congestion. The superficially appealing idea is that if
we all live closer to where we work and shop, shorter car trips and mass transit will replace all those long car
rides. But the real world doesn't work that way. Try this thought experiment. What happens at a cocktail
party when a new wave of people shows up and the population density of the living room doubles? Is it
harder or easier to get to the bar and the cheese tray? Is it harder or easier to carry on conversation and
move around the room? As urban population density rises, auto-traffic congestion gets worse, not better,
and commute times get longer, not shorter. (Steven Hayward, "Suburban Legends", National Review, March
22, 1999, p. 36. Quoted in The Fallacy Files website, by Gary N. Curtis)
3. Fallible Sign The notion that certain types of evidence are symptomatic of some wider principle or outcome.
For example, smoke is often considered a sign for fire. Some people think high SAT scores are a sign a
person is smart and will do well in college.
Evaluation: 1. how strong is the relationship between the overt sign and the inferred claim? 2. Have
sufficient, typical, accurate, relevant instances of this relationship been observed? 3. Have other potential
influences been ruled out? If the appeal to sign is weak in any of these 3 respects, it may be a “sign” that
the arguer has committed the fallacy of fallible sign.
4. Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc (Latin for “after the fact, therefore because of the fact”)
This involves either a) confusing correlation and causation, or (and this is usually the same thing) inferring
'after the fact, therefore because of the fact').
We can evaluate this via the STAR criteria. For an argument about cause to be reliable, we need a sufficient
number of typical, accurate and relevant instances. Also important are questions concerning degree of
correlation; the question of controls; elimination of other factors; the extent to which causes are partial,
necessary or sufficient. If the causal argument fails these tests, it may commit the post hoc fallacy.
Example 1: “In an interesting book about television called The Plug in Drug, the author, Marie Winn, claims
that television is responsible for many contemporary social problems including the breakdown of traditional
attitudes such as respect for authority. One of her arguments in support of her thesis involves the
observation that the first generation to have been largely reared with television were old enough to go to
college in the late Sixties. She then notes that the college students of the Sixties were very boisterous and
disrespectful, staging demonstrations and sit-ins right and left. This evidence, she believes, supports her
case that television causes disrespect for authority.” (From the Fallacies Handbook).
Example 2: "We need safe storage laws." False. States that passed "safe storage" laws have high crime rates,
especially higher rates of rape and aggravated assault against women. ("The Media Campaign Against Gun
Ownership", The Phyllis Schlafly Report, Vol. 33, No. 11, June 2000. Quoted in The Fallacy Files website, by
Gary N. Curtis)
5. False Authority Appeals to authority are common ways of supporting an argument. However, the strength
of the appeal depends on the degree to which person X or text X constitutes an authoritative source on the
issue in question. We can ask whether the arguer presents us with sufficient, typical, accurate, relevant
authorities. We can also ask whether the issue is one that a significant number of authorities are likely to
agree on. More broadly, we can ask if we have been presented with a sufficient number of authoritative
sources, accurately cited with relevant knowledge, who are in broad agreement, and whose arguments are
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persuasive? If the answer to such questions is “no,” the arguer’s claim may involve the fallacy of “false
authority.”
Example: a politician from a farm state once argued that CO2 is good for plants, thus greenhouse gases will
help agriculture and should not be a problem. While this person may be a political authority, he is not an
atmospheric scientist, and thus citing him as an authority is weak.
6. Misapplied Principle Appeals to principle involve locating a principle that is widely regarded as valid and
showing that a situation exists in which this principle applies. To the extent that the following conditions are
true, the appeal may be considered strong or weak: is the principle widely accepted? Does it accurately
apply to the situation in question? Are there commonly agreed on exceptions? Has the general principle
been misapplied? Have rebuttal conditions been ignored? Are the practical consequences of following the
principle sufficiently desirable in the context?
For example, refraining from killing others is generally considered an important principle. However, there
are commonly agreed upon exceptions – self-defense, military combat, etc. Are there 'rival' principles that
lead to a different claim? In the war with Iraq, proponents argued for the principle of unilateral preemption,
whereas others argued for the competing principle of multilateral containment/deterrence.
Some of the More Common Fallacies
1. Straw Man – when an author does not accurately represent an opponent’s argument, or presents a weak,
caricatured version of that argument.
Example: consider the following silly analogy. Imagine that I claim that I am so tough and so good at boxing
that I could easily beat Mike Tyson. To prove this, I construct a boxing ring in class. I set up a life-size
cardboard picture of Mike Tyson, knock it over, and start jumping up and down shouting “I am the
greatest!” You would probably point out that I have not in fact defeated Mike Tyson, but have merely
knocked down his effigy. You note that if I had confronted the real Mike Tyson he would have beaten me
like an old mule. This is analogous to the straw man fallacy – instead of taking on the full force of an
opponent’s argument, the author sets up a weak version of his opponent, knocks it down, and claims
victory.
Note: sometimes a writer may create a straw man by exaggerating the force of an opponent’s claim. Since
stronger evidence is required to support a more forceful claim, the writer can then attack the opponent by
saying that her evidence does not support her claim.
2. Slippery Slope – when an author extrapolates from an opponent’s position too “creatively.” Often this
involves drawing out implications from an opponent’s position in a way that is only loosely based on the
opponent’s stated position, or which proceeds too far from the opponent’s stated position. Claiming that
certain things “follow” inevitably from an opponent’s position (in a kind of “chain reaction”) when in fact
such an inference is difficult to sustain.
■ Silly example: some proponents of gun rights have proposed that any weakening of gun laws is an attack
on the constitution, and if successful will likely to lead to attacks on other constitutional freedoms, which
may in turn undermine democracy in America, and ultimately lead to UN control of the U.S. (complete with
black helicopters flying over the capital.) This example is obviously an exaggeration (perhaps even an
example of a “straw man”.) The point to note is that one must be careful when talking about the
implications of an opponent’s argument, of arguing that certain (usually bad) things “follow” inevitably from
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an opponent’s position.
■ Gay Marriage example: “If we allow gay marriage…what will be the next step? If gays are allowed to marry
because they have made a lifestyle choice, what about polygamy? What about group marriages? What
about marriage between family members? What about "marriage" being whatever I subjectively decide it
is?” (“Caloblog husband,” http://www.calblog.com/archives/003369.html) Arguments opposing gay
marriage sometimes argue that marriage is the foundation of our society, and any attempt to change the
definition of marriage may shake those foundations and undermine the many other institutions of which
marriage is a part.
■ When California debated legalizing medical marijuana, some opponents argued that we could not do this
as it would lead down a slippery slope – soon doctors would be asked for “medical heroin,” and “medical
cocaine,” and addiction would spiral out of control.
3. Begging the Question/Leading Question – this fallacy involves assuming something that it is the arguers
responsibility to prove. It thus typically involves the assumptions that an arguer makes. This fallacy often
takes the form of a question (“Have you stopped beating your wife yet,” “Are you still as conceited as you
used to be?”) but can also be found in the definitions and categories used by an arguer (“the
liberal/conservative media”, “the death tax,” etc.) Leading questions are attempts to force a respondent to
accept a particular way of seeing an issue. Example: “will you protect our children’s future by voting for the
governor’s recall?” Anyone who says “no,” regardless of his or her reasons for not wanting to vote for a
recall, is made to seem uncaring.
Example: "A major problem in dealing with Irving as a cross-examiner lay in the fact that he would
frequently build into his often lengthy and elaborate questions assumptions that themselves rested on his
falsification of the evidence, and so had to be disputed before the question itself could be dealt with. This
tactic, whether conscious or not, did not escape the attention of the judge. 'No, Mr. Irving, that will not do,
will it?' he exclaimed on one such occasion: 'You cannot put a question which has as its premise a
misstatement about the date when gas chambers began operating.... If you are going to ask that question,
and it is a relevant question, you must premise it correctly.'" (Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History,
Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2001, p. 202. Quoted in The Fallacy Files website, by Gary
N. Curtis.)
4. False Dilemma/Dichotomy – this involves oversimplifying an issue by declaring that only two alternatives or
ways of viewing the issue exist. Often one of these alternatives is clearly bad, so it is implied that there is
only one reasonable position to take. Sometimes people criticize such an argumentative strategy by saying
that it is “reductive.” Consider the bumper sticker “America – love it or leave it.” This assumes there are
only two choices. You must “love” America (and by extension, whatever policy its leaders carry out) or you
should leave. There is no middle ground, no room for a more qualified, nuanced position (bumper stickers
tend to simplify issues, perhaps in part because they can consist of only a few words).
Example: “Either restrictions must be placed on freedom of speech or certain subversive elements in society
will use it to destroy this country. Since to allow the latter to occur is unconscionable, we must restrict
freedom of speech.”
5. Stacking the deck – this involves favoring evidence that suits your claim, and ignoring evidence that does not
support it. We can use the STAR criteria – sufficiency, typicality, accuracy and relevance. For example, if
you were writing an argument supporting legalization of marijuana, and you only cited scientific authorities
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who support the legalization of marijuana, you would be stacking the deck. You need to also consider
authorities who do not support the legalization of marijuana.
6. Genetic Fallacy
The genetic fallacy is occurs when the premises in an argument for a proposition are evaluated based on the
origin of the premises instead of their content. It can sometimes be misguided to either endorse or
condemn an idea based on its’ past--rather than on its present--merits or demerits, unless its’ past is
relevant to its present value. For instance, the origin of testimony--whether first hand, hearsay, or rumor-carries weight in evaluating it.
7. Shifting the burden of proof
When something is at issue, the responsibility, or burden of proof, sometimes falls equally on both sides, but
sometimes it falls more heavily on one side than on the other. For example, in a legal context the accused is
“presumed innocent until proven guilty,” which means that the burden of proof is on the prosecution not
the accused. The accused does not have to prove his/her innocence – burden of proof lies with the
prosecution. The prosecution must prove the guild of the accused “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Example: if I think aliens are being held in Area 51, it is up to me to make the case. If I make my case by
saying “unless you can show me evidence that aliens are not being held in Area 51, this must be true,” this is
obviously unfair. For it is often hard to prove a negative. Moreover, the burden of proof is with me – I have
claimed aliens are being held in Area 51, therefore it is up to me to make the case, not you to disprove it.
Arguments about religion sometimes proceed this way, for example when an atheist is asked to prove God
doesn’t exist.
8. Argument ad Ignoratium (from the Latin, “argument from ignorance”)
Proposing that a claim is true primarily because it hasn't been proved false, or that something is false
primarily because it has not been proved true. Arguing that unless an opponent can prove otherwise, a claim
must be true. Note that the problem with this way of arguing is that the arguer stakes his/her claim on the
lack of support for a contrary or contradictory claim, rather than basing it on reasons and evidence. This
fallacy sometimes overlaps with the fallacy of shifting the burden of proof.
Example: Since you can’t prove that the universe was not created by God, it must therefore have been
created by God.
Example: An often-cited example is this statement by Senator Joseph McCarthy, when asked for evidence to
back up his accusation that a certain person was a communist:
I do not have much information on this except the general statement of the agency that there is nothing
in the files to disprove his communist connections. (Cited in A Rulebook for Arguments by Anthony
Weston,1992.)
As McCarthy’s critics noted, the absence of evidence that someone is not a communist is a very poor
argument that s/he is a communist. Using this logic one could accuse almost anyone of anything.
9. Red Herring: The name comes from a trick once used by prisoners to escape dogs tracking them. Prisoners
would drag a fish along the path away from their escape route and thus throw off the scent. Red Herring
involves bringing up irrelevant issues, or drawing attention away from the issue at hand by bringing up
irrelevant considerations. Example: “The governor’s economic program won’t work. It does nothing to stop
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illegal streetcar racing in San Diego.”
10. Ad Hominem ((from the Latin, “against the man”) – attacking the arguer and her/his character rather than
the question at issue. Note that there are contexts where the character of the arguer may be relevant to
the issue. We may reasonably disbelieve the argument of a convicted embezzler who argues s/he should be
put in charge of the finances of a soccer club. However, if this same person argued that he should play wing
on the soccer team, it would be an ad hominem attack to counter by saying he should not because he has
been convicted of embezzlement.
Note that it may be reasonable to bring into question a speaker’s ethos. Aristotle suggests that the ethos of
a speaker plays a crucial role in determining whether an argument is persuasive or not. It may also be fair
and relevant to question the way an author has constructed his/her ethos.
Abusive – directed at speaker
Circumstantial – directed at some group. Similar to ‘Poisoning the Well’
Tu quoquo (‘thou too’)
“You say I shouldn't become an alcoholic because it will hurt me and my family, yet you yourself are an
alcoholic, so your argument can't be worth listening to.”
11. Non Sequitor (from the Latin, “it does not follow”)
Refers to a conclusion that has no apparent connection to the premises. Example: “affirmative action will
not work because someone stole my car.” Many examples of this can be found in advertising. Consider
advertisements that sell beer or car equipment by showing them next to a beautiful woman. The implied
argument is often that you should buy this equipment/beer because the woman is there, or because doing
so will make it more likely that a beautiful woman will “like” you.
12. The Fallacy of Equivocation
This occurs when a word or phrase that has more than one meaning is employed in different meanings
throughout the argument.
■"Every society is, of course, repressive to some extent - as Sigmund Freud pointed out, repression is the
price we pay for civilization." (John P. Roche- political columnist)
■ In this example, the word repression is used in two completely different contexts. "Repression" in Freud's
mind meant restricting sexual and psychological desires. "Repression" in the second context does not mean
repression of individual desires, but government restriction of individual liberties, such as that in a
totalitarian state.
■ "Those noisy people object to racism because they believe it is discrimination. Yet even they agree that it
is OK to choose carefully which tomatoes to buy in the supermarket. They discriminate between the overripe, the under-ripe, and the just right. They discriminate between the TV shows they don't want to watch
and those they do. So, what's all this fuss about racism if they're willing to discriminate, too?”
■ “The World works according to natural laws, and for laws to work there must be a lawgiver.”
“Darwin's theory of evolution is just that, a theory. Theories are just ideas that are not certain or infallible.
We don't want our children to believe that theories are certain or infallible, so we shouldn't teach the theory
of evolution in school without mentioning this, and without including alternatives such as intelligent design.”
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Analyze the Statements & Identify Weaknesses/Fallacy
SAMPLE GMAT Strategies/Fallacies Exercise
1. “Since you don't believe that the earth is teetering on the edge of destruction, you must believe
that pollution and other adverse effects that man has on the environment are of no concern
whatsoever.”
2. “The stock market declined shortly after the election of the president, thus indicating the lack of
confidence the business community has in the new administration.”
3. “ln a recent survey conducted by Wall Street Weekly of its readers, 80% of the respondents
indicated their strong disapproval of increased capital gains taxes. This survey clearly shows that
increased capital gains taxes will meet with strong opposition from the electorate.”
4. “People should keep their promises, right? I loaned Dwayne my knife, and he said he'd return it.
Now he is refusing to give it back, but I need it right now to slash up my neighbors' families.
Dwayne isn't doing right by me.”
5. “People who oppose mandatory sentencing want convicted rapists and killers to get off scotfree.”
Identify the Strategy and/or Fallacy
1. “People object to racism because they say it is a form of discrimination. Yet even they agree that it is
OK to choose carefully which tomatoes to buy in the supermarket. They discriminate between the overripe, the under-ripe, and the just right. They discriminate between TV shows they don't want to watch
and those they do. So, what's all this fuss about racism if they're willing to discriminate, too?”
2. “Scripture is either God's pure, infallible word, free of any contradiction, error or inconsistency, or it is
a purely human invention full of error, inconsistency and contradiction that can be dismissed as such.
Since one can clearly find contradictions and errors in the bible, the bible can thus be dismissed.”
3. “Darwin's theory of evolution is just that, a theory. Theories are merely ideas that are not certain or
infallible. We don't want our children to believe that theories are certain or infallible, so we shouldn't
teach the theory of evolution in school without mentioning this, and without including alternatives such
as intelligent design.”
1. LSAT SAMPLE QUESTION
“Premiums for automobile accident insurance are often higher for red cars than for cars of other colors.
To justify these higher charges, insurance companies claim that, overall, a greater percentage of red cars
are involved in accidents than are cars of any other colors. If this claim is true, then lives could
undoubtedly be saved by banning red cars from the roads altogether.” The reasoning in the argument is
flawed because the argument:
A) Accepts without question that insurance companies have the right to charge higher premiums for higher
risk clients.
B) Fails to consider whether red cars cost the same to repair as cars of other colors.
C) Ignores the possibility that drivers who drive recklessly have a preference for red cars.
D) Does not specify precisely what percentage of red cars are involved in accidents.
E) Makes an unsupported assumption that every automobile accident results in some loss of life.
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