= credibility
This entire reading was about optical illusions – in both science and daily life – and how they work in order to fool our perception. They started off with a test to show that all people see certain illusions differently and then they go on to explain what an optical illusion actually is – eventually leading to the many examples of said definition. For example, he explained how mirages are just optical illusions that are created from refracted light rays and distorted imagery.
The author of this piece was Brian Rohrig. On amazon.com, I discovered that he is an “award winning high school science teacher” who received his B.S. in Agriculture and M.Ed. at Kent State University. I also found that he has written eight science books as well as numerous magazine articles – i.e. ChemMatters, the Science Teacher, etc. His versatile writing skills and strong education express his credibility quite clearly.
The context of this piece would definitely be casual. The situation of this article would be casual because the author would have never have made this article unless he had to answer to an originally posed question about how optical illusions work. Since he had to create an article from hypotheses on how things work, it shows me that he had to grow and develop this article through the interactions, questions and discoveries of others throughout history.
The purpose for this article was for readers to learn about illusions from an informational standpoint through unique examples (ones that show different sizes of the moon, one that distorts color, length, size, shape, etc…). Based on that, his overall obvious intention was to have the readers take something new away from his article.
His background and established credibility suggest that his audience is mainly high-schoolers (because he was a high school teacher and worked most of his lifetime just to better improve high school students – based on his awards).
Rhetorical elements:
Organization: The organization of the entire piece was extremely systematic. The clean and crisp organization of the images against the descriptions and writing (which pertains to the images) shows the audience that this information is trustworthy because of the efficient standpoint.
Classical Argument – Intro/Conclusion: The introduction reflects the introduction of the CA because in the beginning they give a very generalized and well-known fact about optical illusions: that no one truly knows how they work because we all see them differently. Their conclusion is also alike to the CA because they leave us with a “so what” by saying “optical illusions open up a small window into how [the brain] works”.
Enthymeme: They included enthymeme because the author always mentioned logical reasoning but with a few ideas left unstated. In this passage, enthymeme came up when he was discussing how optical illusions work – based on scientific studies with facts. For example he talked about the moon illusion and why it occurs to be larger at some points than others. He gives logical facts about how “our brain sees a flattened dome” which eventually leads to the logical explanation that “the moon appears farther off at the horizon”. However, he does not mention any background on domes (which lead us to the conclusion) because it is just assumed that we know that, at certain points, a dome may look distorted or make images appear larger. This can also pertain to logos because of all of the information he included (even though he allowed us to assume some).
The author accomplished their main purpose. First of all, their main purpose was to extend the knowledge of the readers on an interesting and well-known topic of optical illusions. They accomplished this purpose because the reader not only took away some new-fangled information, but they were also left to think about why it was all important (with the “so what” in the end).
No comments:
Post a Comment