Do I really like Chapter 1 more than Chapter 2?

Chapter two was more interesting to me than the first chapter because I was drawn more towards the philosophy of the program than the rules and regulations. The ideas behind the use of rhetoric has always intrigued me which is one good way to capture my attention. The use of language and writing to try and persuade the intended audience to change their point of view about a subject has a very powerful potential for use or even misuse in some situations. I am certain that many of us can point out cases of misuse throughout history.

I have often wondered if there are situations or subjects that rhetoric would have no effect on the intended audience and I feel that may depend on how informed or misinformed that audience is. Going back less than one hundreds years ago we have a great example of the misuse of this power when a very charismatic man created the perfect rhetorical situation with the perfect misinformed audience and convinced them that genocide of a group of people was in the best interest of their country.

Hopefully today's audiences are more well informed about the world they live in and we won't fall into this trap of the misuse of rhetoric and allow history to repeat itself. With the availability of information today it would be very difficult for a writer to find a misinformed audience to sway in the wrong direction. There are audiences that I feel rhetoric would have no effect on no matter how talented the writer.

Politics. A dirty word to some and loved by others, it has as many opinions as people involved in it and this is the one subject and audience that I think has an immunity to rhetoric. If you don't believe it then try and change somebody's opposing view to yours about politics and you are more likely to start a fight more than anything else. I discovered this while posting on a message board that often discusses politics on a private website. While there I ran a non-scientific poll about the posters voting habits and if they vote a “straight ticket” and the results I got back from the over seventy-five responses closely coincided with a poll on political party affiliation from 2004 that I studied in government class. The poll showed that the far right and far left of the political spectrum only covered 17% each of the voting population while 40% was made up of independents whose vote could go either way, there was a margin of error of +/- 3%.

This message board was a perfect slice out of the pie of American voters and it was very east to determine which posters were a part of that far left and right of that political fringe. To this day I have not seen anyone be able to convince the people on the right that President Obama is not a Muslim or on the other side convince the left that Glen Beck is not the anti-Christ. Most posters on the board do however agree that it is probably impossible to change anyone's mind about politics.