Hidden Stories

This week as a class, we looked at the award-winning documentary, “The Queen of Basketball” by Ben Proudfoot. “The Queen of Basketball” follows the biography and professional life of Lusia Harris, the first female NBA draftee. Harris, who stood six feet three inches tall, was a trailblazer in every sense of the word, and her story is one of bravery, determination, and passion. Throughout the documentary, we can observe several characteristics of commemorative rhetoric that are used to pay tribute to the life and legacy of Lusia Harris.

To begin let’s define commemorative rhetoric and what anyone should look for when it comes to finding it in documentaries. Commemorative rhetoric is a type of speech that is focused on celebrating a person or an event. The goal of this style of rhetoric is basically to showcase and bring more awareness to this person, idea, or event that might not get the recognition it deserved. In the case of Lusia Harris and her career, I would say the majority of NBA fans might not even know who she is or what she accomplished. Through this blog post, I want to focus on three different points. Emotional, symbolism, and achievement aspects.

Through commemorative rhetoric, the film evokes strong emotional responses from the audience. It uses archival footage and animations to enhance the emotional dimension of the stories told through interviews with Harris’ family, former teammates, and basketball legends. These intervals really pull the audience into the film and sometimes can make them feel connected through their stories.

Throughout the film, it frequently employs symbols or metaphors to highlight a subject’s significance. The most obvious, the basketball, symbolizes Harris’ determination, dedication, and talent. Old pictures and videos are used as symbols of Harris’s life and achievements. They serve to illustrate her journey and her influence on basketball.

Lusia Harris also exhibits this rhetorical style in her accomplishments. In one segment of the documentary, Harris’ historic accomplishments as the first woman drafted into the NBA and her impact on basketball are celebrated through the championship rings and trophies that symbolize her accomplishments and excellence on and off the court.

To conclude, “The Queen of Basketball” displays numerous characteristics of epideictic or commemorative rhetoric. Using various techniques to elicit emotional responses and celebrate Lusia Harris’ accomplishments and virtues, the film honors Lusia Harris’ life and legacy. This documentary is a true masterpiece and a great example that you don’t need a long film in order to persuade your audience. As we move forward and think about our own documentaries, “The Queen of Basketball” is a perfect template to follow and gain influence for our own style of rhetoric for the future.

Finding Style with Nick Flynn

This week, in discovering rhetoric, we learned the importance of style and why it’s beneficial to understand how it works. Before diving deeper into what style means, let’s first define it so we have a clearer understanding. The best way to understand style is to keep it as basic as possible and to see it be used in an example. Style can be described as “Common patterns and characteristics in effective and persuasive communication shared by certain types of writing”. We can also look at this how people dress. Everyone has a certain way that they dress, it’s their certain style. Over the years, that style can change and get better just like our writing capabilities. A part of having a good style of rhetoric is the way it sounds.

Sam Leith, the author of Words Like Loaded Pistols, writes about the importance of having a quality sound when using rhetoric. The best way to look at this is through poems. Leith writes “You can hear when a sentence is sinuous and forward-moving…” (Leith 129) just like poems, there is a rhythm and motive behind every sentence which Leith describes as “memorable speech”. See, rhetoric is all about speaking to your audience in a way and motive that they will understand you. Politicians write and speak in a sound that moves their audience and hopefully captures the attention of others so that hopefully they can gain an even larger audience.

This week we went through a book written by Nick Flynn called, The Ticking is the Bomb, and at first glance, we can see that Flynn is a very unique writer. Nothing about Flynn is traditional in his writing. The chapters are more like journal entries, chapter numbers aren’t capitalized, and even the title of the book isn’t traditional. So why write like this? I believe this is Flynn’s personal style and the way he can seem more personal to his audience. It’s clear that there is a certain audience he targets with the way he writes. Flynn explains to his audience that he has a daughter on the way and even his word choice and rhythm are different from most authors. Even from the very beginning of the book, we can see some poeticness as he writes, “One day I hope to be able to tell my daughter a story about a dark time… how her coming was a ray of light”(Flynn 2). As Flynn writes about his past, there’s even an abruptness to his chapters almost as if he doesn’t want to say too much. Maybe this is his way of showing his audience the type of trauma he has gone through. I’m curious to learn more about his way of thinking and to dive deeper into every mini-chapter that he writes.

As the week progresses and as we learn more about Flynn and his past, I am ready to try and understand his certain style and why he writes a lot yet shows little to no emotion. Maybe he is waiting for when his daughter to be born to be vulnerable with her? Or, maybe he hasn’t fully recovered and his writing is a way to express himself without giving too much insight to the readers.

Diving Deeper

In last week’s post, we discussed rhetoric basics and analyzed the book, Central Park 5. In this week’s reading, we dive deeper into the reading with what happened with the five boys and the question I want to hone in on is one that Burn’s brings to the table. Which is this, “How did this happen?” (Burns 2012). This sounds like a shallow question to ask, however, there is so much to unpack within this question.

In the first two chapters of CP5, Burns does a fantastic job laying down the framework of the time New York City was in and the conditions each boy lived in. To her credit, she creates a colorful image for her readers to really grasp the idea of what their life was like. After reading the first two chapters, most readers have already formed an opinion on how they, the reader, feel about the case and the position the boys are in. This is excellent because we see Burns using pathos to connect to the reader on an emotional level. In other words, the readers feel persuaded to feel a certain way.

Burns touches on the subject of how the media played an important role in how the people felt about the 5 boys being accused at the time. After the news broke, the media described the boys as “criminals” and unfortunately the audience bought into this idea. Understandably so, everyone was just looking for a means to an end and this was their best bet to close the case and not stir any more uproar. No one believed the five were innocent, even their strongest supporters arguing instead that the racism and bad economy in New York contributed to their crimes. The “evidence” against them was so strong in the public’s view that no one really believed they were innocent. In an effort to railroad their truth into reality, the police forced the wrong people to confess with wildly differing accounts of what they did. It was a terrible interpretation of the concept of conjectural and definitional stasis. The media used pathos to touch into the people’s emotions and persuaded them that these young 5 men had committed such a crime.

Another topic to touch upon is that race played a huge part on why these men were convicted in the first place. Burn writes, “In the case of white boys or black victims, it would not have been the tabloid sensation it became. People believed these five teenage boys had committed the crime because of their race, and no one ever suggested they might be innocent” (pages 89-90). Race contributed to both extreme reactions to the crime, as well as making it easier for so many to believe that they had committed the crime in the first place.

To conclude this weeks blog, it’s important to also understand from a readers perspective, there are so many details and information that we still don’t know about. So, it’s important for us, the reader, to make our own assumptions and really use rhetoric to understand the issue at hand.

Discovering Rhetoric

The art of rhetoric. What does it mean to be rhetoric and why is it essential for us to understand? To begin, it is important to lay out the definition of rhetoric before diving into this week’s discussion about rhetoric. To keep it simple, rhetoric is a way of speech and a way to communicate with people in a persuasive manner. In the words of Leith, author of “Words like a Loaded Pistol”, “Rhetoric is a collection of low tricks designed to confuse and bamboozle an audience into thinking the weak argument is the stronger one”. Still confused? That’s okay! Let’s use rhetoric as an example to help our understanding of it. On our TV screens, we see rhetoric being used with every ad that tells us to buy a product or any politician giving a speech on why you should vote for them uses rhetoric too.

This week’s discussion was on chapter one of “Central Park five”. Within the chapter we see rhetoric being used abundantly as the text writes about a controversial topic of race in New York City during the 1980s. The infamous Central Park Jogger case was touched on in this chapter. This case was about 5 young minority boys who were convicted of rape, sexual assault, and attempted murder. They were in jail for 13 years until one witness came forth and they were later told that they had been falsely accused. There are a lot of factors as we, the reader, must take into account to fully understand the situation and how rhetoric was being used.

This chapter consists of a lot of rhetoric, so it’s important to understand some of the appeals the author is making. I am struck by how heavily the chapter begins with pathos. Throughout the book, the author describes the interests, activities, struggles, and even friendships of each of the convicted boys. The boys seemed to be normal, especially since most had no history of running into legal issues. It discusses judicial rhetoric in the chapter. Law and minority issues are discussed. It was sometimes dangerous for law enforcement to handle situations because of the fear of death.

It is crucial to understand the injustices against African Americans at this time and the dangerous lifestyle that was created for most of them in New York City. If this chapter lacked persuasiveness, the reader would have to assume that the minority group was being wrongly accused solely because of their skin color. This book can be seen as a way to teach us the issues of the past to help us in the future to make sure no mistakes get made while we try to break the barriers of racism.