Blog #5

Peg Tyre in the article “Bringing up Adultolescents”, is making a claim about twenty something year old children still living with their families. Tyre is focusing on the fact that adults are relying on their parents for everything from, living at home, paying their rent and choosing their careers. These “adultolescents” are comfortable with being dependent on their parents and putting their independent nature on hold just to get a few extra years from the parentals. It is not just the children to blame; the parents are so involved in their children’s lives they are letting the dependency continue. In fact, they enable their children consciously. Some break their banks to support their children to attend grad school so they have the upper hand when entering the real world. They want their children to have everything they did not have and more. This is creating a generation dependent on what their parents can do for them, not what they can accomplish on their own. Tyre states, “Relying on your folks to light the shadowy path to the future has become so accepted that even the ultimate loser move-returning home to live with your parents- has lost its stigma”. People are integrating living with their parents after college as part of the grand plan. Instead of moving on after college to bigger and better things people fall pathetically back on their parents.

Tyre, Peg. "Bringing Up Adultolescents." Essentials of Argument 133-136.

Blog #4

Warrants are the general beliefs about an argument. They are the commonly accepted attitudes about subjects. They do not have to be written out in the argument because the warrants are assumed, and spelling them out would be redundant and boring. So, it is best when the warrants are shared between the author and the audience. In the book Essentials of Argument, the author states, “if the audience shares the warrants with the arguer, the audience will accept them, and the argument is convincing. If the warrants are in conflict and the audience does not accept them, the argument is not convincing to them.” (102) Warrants provide connections between the reader and the arguer attempting to make the argument more convincing. So, when there is discrepancies between the two there is little they can relate to which makes it difficult for the argument to be successful. The warrant unites the claim and the support so that the audience can accept certain assertions. To provide an example, someone from Japan might not understand a certain warrant about our president, but an American citizen would hold similar assumptions about the president with an American author. As long as cultural values are the same and it is a big enough generalization, the arguer and the audience can share warrants.

Wood, Nancy V.. Essentials of Arguments. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006.

Blog #3 Visual Argument

Visual argument is an effective way of posing a stand on an issue because of the emotion an image can evoke. I feel the emotional responses that are caused by visual arguments are the most important features. In Essentials of Argument it states that “visual argument operates more directly on the emotions than written argument because images communicate more directly than words”. An image can provide an audience with an immediate response that is less critical than print. While reading a person will tend to be more analytical than if they were simply looking at a picture. It is easy and quick so people do not have to take a lot of time thinking about what they are experiencing. Emotion is then important because it gets to the root of a person and trigger feelings that can persuade your audience to agree with your argument. Provoking emotion in your audience is vital to the successfulness of your visual argument.

Images surround us and we put labels on all of them. McCloud put it perfect when he called them icons rather than images or symbols. Symbol is a subcategory for the term icon, but icon is a better term to describe images because it is more general. I found that the most important feature of visual images because if you understand icons you can better understand the meaning of visual images. Icons can be used to represent anything using pictures, letters, faces, cartoons, etc. They can be generic, yet there are icons that are universally understood to be the same. The generalness of images is crucial to the idea of visual images, but also understanding the specificity is important.