Course Reflection: English 2010

Parting the Reeds: a Reflection on the Unexpected

When I began this course, I was completely unaware of the direction this course would take me. I was expecting some creative work; maybe I would be writing out chapters of some novella or practicing email drafts. I was not expecting to focus on a single subject, let alone that the subject would be invasive reeds I’d never heard of before the semester began. The first subject I chose was the poor animals in the Lagoon amusement park “zoo,” an issue which I have been aware of since the mid 2010s and which I thought back then was soon to be addressed and solved. Apparently it still hasn’t been solved, despite somewhat consistent public pressure over the last 15 years or so. Nevertheless, I moved on from that issue after the first draft of my Flash Memoir, as frankly I wasn’t about to buy a season pass to Lagoon to get the sort of content I would need to keep the ball rolling for the rest of the class.

Instead I chose the invasive reed Phragmites Australis Australis, a kind of superpowered grass which has a habit of destroying wetland ecosystems from the midwest Great Lakes to our Great Salt Lake here in Utah. I wish I could say something cool like “It came to me in a dream, the stems of the reeds tangling in the feathers of a great Red Winged Blackbird, as it tried to fly from the tightly crowded wetland growth,” but it was actually just a news article on my Google homepage. It was an interview with Benjamin Stireman, speculating about the water that could be preserved in the Great Salt Lake if it weren’t for this one aggressive plant. I thought about it for a few minutes, and decided that this was the topic for me. I’m not a big fan of reiterating common talking points on an issue that’s well known, like veteran mental health or youth smoking rates. We all know that these things need solutions, we all know that there are multiple solutions available, and that the main issues are cultural and institutional inertia. I wanted to introduce readers to a problem they didn’t already know about.

I thought about the ways in which I engage with writing. I like fiction, and I like political works. But when it comes to informational writing, it’s all about articles. Sometimes with pictures or graphs, but most of the time it’s just straight up written words. I don’t go in much for the video versions of the news, although I do like NPR when I’m driving and I’ll watch Al Jazeera from time to time. But for a subject like the Phragmites, I wanted to go 100 percent article formats because that’s how I would engage with it as a reader. I don’t need short-form TikTok type snips, I don’t need graphs. Maps are nice but they’re not very available for the Phragmites topic, at least not up to date within the last few years.

Then came the adaptation requirement. As a part of my online magazine project, I was required to adapt one of my works into a different format. I chose my profile on Benjamin Stireman for this adaptation, as it was my least-favorite piece of writing of the pieces I’ve made this semester. I had tried to arrange an actual interview with the man, but he never got back to me. I considered choosing a different subject, but Benjamin is kind of the most relevant person when it comes to this topic. So I thought a little more broadly about the ways I engage with writing, and I decided on an audio version of that profile. I thought that if I couldn’t have Benjamin’s voice represented, I may as well have my own. So I read my profile out loud, and uploaded it to my magazine. I think it turned out fairly well, and it showed me how awkward it can be to simply read my own writing aloud. The difference between pure text and text that is meant to be converted into audio is wider than I thought it would be, and I had to make some edits to the writing to make it digestible in the audio format.

Writing is a powerful tool for mass communication. It bears reflection that before radio, the only way to spread ideas to a large audience was through writing in newspapers, public bulletins, or I suppose pronouncements on scrolls read by loud-voiced individuals in town squares. Most things on the radio are written before they are read, highlighting the importance of writing simply for the organization of thought into an eloquent string of words. Without written language, the spread of information from the concept of democracy to the warnings accompanying a toaster would be functionally impossible.

Beyond being a tool for outward communication, writing represents an important tool for inward focus. Following a consistent and cumulative string of thought from problem to solution is often quite difficult, distractions and lapses of memory are extremely common for our wonderful species. With the relative permanence of writing, though, the cognitive load of a complicated and nebulous process of thoughts can be honed into a sentence, dropped, picked back up and completed.

Inspecting a piece of writing through the lens of rhetorical analysis is essential to discerning a good idea from a bad idea, a poor argument from a persuasive one. An argument that relies entirely on ethos or pathos, is never as effective as one which stands firmly on the tripod of logos, ethos, and pathos together, as I’ve tried to do with my Persuasion Effect project. An argument which stands on all three without kairos to make it heavy, substantial, is only ever as impactful as the reader’s individual interest allows, however. I drew the kairos of my subject largely from the fact that the Great Salt Lake is dying, lending a sort of overarching time-sensitive menace to the reeds.

There are, however, some situations in which some forms of rhetoric are inappropriate. In my Information Effect essay, I tried to keep the pathos and even the ethos to a minimum and rely entirely on logos to show what the reeds are, and why there is a problem with their being here in Utah, rather than trying to tell people how they should think and feel about that problem. In my Flash Memoir project, logos seemed inappropriate. It’s not really an argument at all, it’s a glimpse into my experience as a human being. Trying to insert some sort of logical or ethical argument is worthless, I can’t ask someone to feel what I’ve felt or be who I am, only to share in the feelings I felt that day. An understanding of the roles played by all four of these rhetorical elements allows an informed reader to understand and evaluate an idea or argument or a story for what it is under the hood, rather than simply a surface impression based on appeal to authority or some other fallacious metric.