Help Received:
Thesaurus, Dictionary,
Meeting with Major Garriott, Peer Review,
General Research ___Maxwell Redmond Gallahan___
Maxwell Gallahan
Major Garriott
ERH-101-03
27 October 2016
“Ethos, Pathos, Logos: Used to Influence History Students”
A syllabus is an outline of a course to give the student an idea of what the teacher is looking for in order to get the best grade possible. In the syllabus of my History 101 class, my teacher used ethos, “…the good character and the consequent credibility of the rhetor” (Covino and Jolliffe, 336), pathos,” …will somehow activate or draw upon the sympathies and emotions of the auditors, causing them to attend to and accept its ideas, propositions, or calls for action” (Covino and Jolliffe, 338), and logos,” …the appeal to patterns, conventions, and modes of reasoning that the audience finds convincing and persuasive”( Covino and Jolliffe, 338), to influence the minds and actions of his students in order to accomplish his goal.
My history class in an introductory course and covers history from the post Agricultural era up to about when Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic in 1492. The class consist of 3 tests, 2 papers and 1 final exam, along with quizzes on all readings. The three test are worth 30% of our grade, the exam is worth 20%, the two papers are worth 30%, quizzes are worth 10% and class participation is worth 10%. The professor of the course, Captain Blair P. Turner, is a professor of History and Political Science. He received his B.A. from St. Andrews Presbyterian College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Florida.
I am using the article “What is Rhetoric?”, written by Covino and Jolliffe in our Writing About Writing book, to show how my two primary sources, a syllabus and an assignment sheet, are using Aristotle’s three textual appeals to influence their audience, the students of the class. Covino and Jolliffe are both well qualified individuals, William Covino is the President of California State University and David Jolliffe holds the Brown Chair in English literacy at the University of Arkansas. Using Covino and Jolliffe, I am going to articulate how my History 101 professor is using pathos, logos and ethos to accomplish his implicated and explicated goals, which are to teach his students how to write a good book review and make students appreciate a cultures distinctiveness through texts.
The teacher’s use of pathos depicts the teacher as an authoritarian. Pointing to one specific area where the teacher is displaying his dominances over the students is in the class preparation and participation section, “The class preparation and participation grade will be determined by a judgement call by me on how well you contributed to the class. It can make the difference of an entire letter grade for the course.” He is displaying himself as an authoritarian teacher when he says the grades will be determined by his OWN judgement call and when he harps on the fact that it could be the difference in an entire letter grade. This counts as being an authoritarian because he is basically alluding to the fact that he has the power to change your grade a whole grade lower depending on how he thinks about you as a student. That could be the difference between a student passing his class of failing it. Also this makes the student passive, meaning that we are not being the facilitators of learning like in a discussion class. Because of this the students become the receivers of knowledge, which is being facilitated by the teacher. These things help him to achieve his implicated and explicated goals. The reason being that before he can do anything, he needs to let the students know that first off, they need to be paying attention. In addition, if they aren’t giving him effort in his class, they now know that their grade will suffer. Paying attention helps the teacher reach his goal because he could tell the students to do a variety of things that could potentially help them with writing a well written book report and understand distinctiveness between cultures, but if the students don’t participate in readings and assignments then the students won’t get the content that the teacher thinks will help them get to the goals he has set for them.
Logos is used by the professor in the “writing projects” section of the syllabus to explain what the teacher is planning on doing with the students to help them become better writers, while at the same time learn more about different cultures. The teacher lays out what he intends the writing process to be like, “For the first review, drafts are submitted by each student to another; each recipient of a draft writes a critique for the author; the author then prepares a draft for me; then writes a final. I’ll give specific instructions on each step of this process. For the second review, you will do a first draft for me and then a final.” In the first draft, as it is laid out in the quote, shows that the process will be very long and thoughtful, focusing on the minute details of the process of constructing the paper. This helps the teacher reach his goal of getting his students to become better at book reviews. Simply because when you focus on the details of the process and take time to really think about it, you process the information better as well as retain it. This also leads us back to our first point with pathos, the teacher needs the students to participate if he wants them to actually retain the information he is handing to them. Also the way he is speaking to us is sort of as if he sees us as his peer. He isn’t necessarily giving us baby steps for the process. He is giving us relatively short general directions to trying and point us in the right directions rather then walk us along the process, which is what happened in high school. I think students could take the shortness he is using two ways, if the students came from a good high school then they will be somewhat familiar with this process and be appreciative of the teacher for giving them independence. You could also have kids who came from high schools that never really taught students how to write a thorough paper and could take this as a big road block in the course, causing them to become anxious and overwhelmed, which doesn’t help them in the process of retaining information in class. I say this from personal experience, I was very overwhelmed by this in my first grading period but then he let us know that we could come see him in about that stuff outside of class. I think if he would mention that we could meet with him about the projects and writing process before we had to do it, it would help him get his students to the goals he has set for them.
Captain Turner utilizes ethos throughout the whole syllabus. He shows himself as a simply man. He only has 4 short paragraphs worth of information for us to describe his course. The rest of the syllabus consists of a schedule of when things are due and then rules from the department of history and academic rules from the Institute. This shows that he doesn’t think that the course is that complicated. If the students just pay attention, which the pathos of the teacher is trying to influence the teacher to do, then the students should be able to do well in the class.
Captain Blair P. Turner utilizes ethos, pathos and logos to influence the minds and actions of his students. In doing that he accomplishes his implicated goal which was to teach his students how to write a good book review as well as his explicated goal, which was to make students appreciate a cultures distinctiveness through texts, goals. I think he achieved mostly what he wanted but still could have improved his description of the course and what he wanted the student’s roles to be in the class.
Works Cited
Virginia Military Institute. Academic Catalogue Virginia Military Institute. 2014-1015. http://catalog.vmi.edu/content.php?catoid=11&navoid=331&print#T1
Covino, William, and David Jolliffe. “What Is Rhetoric?” Writing about Writing, edited by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp 325-246.
Word Count: 1330
Leave a Reply