Lucy Liu’s AP Comp Blog

Orwell brings his dark days living in imperial India to the mainstream audience through his essay “Shooting an Elephant.” From the fourth paragraph on, the story takes a dark turn that effectively conveys Orwell’s detached pride viewpoint towards imperialism. His credibility through Ethos is developed in the first few paragraphs, working as a police office in an Indian village. He has experience with dealing with these people, even being their victim, “I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so.” Being English, he has every reason to glorify his country and denounce the Indian ways, but instead he does not take the side that he is expected. He is merely conflicted and indecisive, which weakens and deepens his persona simultaneously. He continues his persona as the victim when he gives reasons for his actions in dealing with the elephant. “The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly.” Here, he claims that because of these people, he’s got no choice but to do so. The internal dialogue itself suggests that he is just looking for excuses. “But I did not want to shoot the elephant.” Again, he is the victim, now appealing to the audience’s pathos through generating pity for himself. By the end of the story, Orwell’s younger persona faced the consequences of his actions. He is slightly disillusioned by the Europeans’ nonchalance towards the dead Indian, and how the elephant trainer is given no heed. But all at once he is also happy that the Indian died so that he had a valid reason to shoot the elephant and be let off the hook. In the last sentence, Orwell, reflecting on his younger self, is finally able to own up to his own foolishness, again giving credibility to his character through his obvious gain of wisdom.

I listened to/read the essays by Robin Baudier, a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, and Craig Newmark, the creator of Craigslist. Both deal with very different circumstances and subject matter, but are generally positive. Baudier bases her essay on a journal entry that she started about two years ago, when she lived in a FEMA trailer with her family. Unlike your typical survivor story, she does not recount her experiences during the hurricane, but begins sometime after it passed and the chaos of survivors had died down a little. Her experiences include some miserable situations, but they are presented in a positive light, and one that says to the audience “it’s not as bad as people make it out to be.” She appeals to a person’s pathos by reveling in her tight-knit family, and at the same time uses ethos by being ashamed of living with her parents, something that many people can identify with. The piece is not trying to create hope, nor is it taking away hope. It is simply the account of one girl’s experiences and the choices she made with her circumstances. She presents this idea well. Craig Newmark, on the other hand, has a generally strong idea but wavers a little by giving inconsistent information about a certain type of person that he comes across. His main point is that through his experience with his website, the majority of people are compliant and conscientious of “the golden rule.” He uses different adjectives to describe this group of people in relation to the whole, such as “most people”, “pretty much everyone”, “Many of us”, and “just a few” to describe the other group of people. He doesn’t go into more detail than that about numbers, and in a normal press setting, his essay would be deemed unreliable. But, since he is dealing with personal experiences which his background credits him expertise in, that shortcoming is negligible. His thesis about the typicality of “good people” comes across as believable.

Regarding persona, the first author uses more pathos, and the second more ethos. Baudier presents her present situation with the intent of generating sympathy, and creating the emotional response to her circumstances. She uses disinterest, however, by stating the opposite of what she should be arguing: that her life is miserable and the government is not doing enough to help her family, etc. Instead, she takes another stance, one more positive and unexpected. With that, she seems genuine. The second author employs ethos to build up his credibility through his background as creator of craigslist. He obviously knows what he is talking about and has had much experience with the subject matter. He is a normal person who shares the same values for safety and security as every other internet user out there, and establishes himself as someone who is looking out for the rest of us. He also claims to not to be idealistic or “syrupy”, using disinterest to make his statement about trustworthy people more effective to the audience.

One of the main points I got out of this article was that knowledge is the most important thing that a gifted child needs to be prepared to fulfill their role in the world. Murray puts an emphasis on isolating the gifted children away from “average” children, so that they can learn more effectively. He however fails to consider what is lost through that isolation. There is a program at UW that essentially allows a few gifted students every year to skip all of high school and go straight to college. Through a rigorous academic course, they are able to graduate from college at the time they were lined up to graduate from high school. It has its costs, though. For one thing, the students’ entire “college” experience is with a group of less than 20 students of the same age. This presents a couple glaring problems: first, that they do not have the normal college (or high school, for that matter) experience that is pivotal in shaping people’s lives and personalities, and second, that they are only interacting with one type of person, themselves being that type of person. If these gifted children are really meant to be the doctors, scientists, politicians, and lawyers of the future, it would be a shame if they never learned how to deal with the different kinds of people they would encounter through their work.

This phenomenon is not limited to exclusive programs, either. As an alumnus of the Highly Capable program, I was almost programmed to choose the “gifted education” as I moved on to middle and high school. As a result I’ve definitely had personal experience with isolation because I always end up in classes with the same types of people (including many classes with the same people). I’ve found that, honors class or not, I am much more successful when I am confident in myself Murray suggests through his article that learning is the way to grow to your full potential, while all the time ignoring that experience and trying new things play an equal, if not greater, role in life. Knowledge can only go so far, even for the most gifted amongst us.

Kenneth Burke’s metaphor for intellectual conversation suggests that they are “neverending” and “interminable,” as if worthwhile conversations deal with topics so complex that they have no resolution or conclusion. The metaphor emphasizes that participants of intellectual conversation can jump right in without previous familiarity of the subject. Intellectual conversation is not an exclusive club, just one that requires confidence in one’s knowledge. Also, when they exit the scene, it is passed off like an obligation, the obligation to step aside and let the conversation flow on. What the metaphor passes over is the value of a person’s contribution. Burke uses a formulaic sequence to describe a contribution: one person says something, another person disagrees, someone else supports, and at some point, people join and others leave. If intellectual conversations were actually redundant like that, no one would have them. Their purpose is to advance the way people think, and even the smallest idle comments can do that. I would instead make the metaphor into repairing the ozone layer: it was already there before our generation was born, but we can just jump into the repairing effort. It will take a long time, even with everyone contributing, but it can get resolved. The only reason for the issue to stay around forever is if there are those hindering others’ progress, or their intellectual advancement. This, however is the reality of conversation in life, and probably why Burke believes in the longevity of intellectual issues.