Gordon G

Rhetoric and Ideology Project Reflection

For this project, our assignment was very open ended. All we had to do was decide on a topic that somehow relates to American ideology and write an opinionated piece about it. The final products of the project were an oral piece and an op-ed opinion piece. My classmates focused on everything from gun control to animal abuse to defense spending. I chose to focus my project on the American food system and the risks that it poses to the American people. My op-ed is about the dangers of the food system, while my presentation uses an analogy comparing the food system to a hamburger to communicate a similar message. Weve been studying rhetoric for most of the year, learning about things like audience appeal, rhetorical devices, and the three Aristotelian appeals: ethos, logos, and pathos. I did my best to incorporate these elements in to my project. This project, and most of this semester, was focused on the rhetoric and ideology of the American experience, so my views on these things have changed a lot. There are two very important things that Ive learned about the American experience specifically through the project. First, I have learned that no matter how out of our control it seems, the American experience can always be changed by the people. The main reason for this is that the American experience is controlled by capitalism, and capitalism is controlled by consumer demand. As the consumers, this means that we have the ability to change how our country works simply by changing our buying habits. I think that this is a very important thing to think about, especially since we all spend so much money each day. If we all start thinking about the effects of that money more, we will be able to change our country. The other realization that Ive come to is that the American experience isnt nearly as simple as it seems. Part of the goal of this course is to deconstruct America, and through this process, I have learned many new things about our history. Every story has two sides, and all too often, we are only shown one. I find this to be an important thing to realize as we think about our political choices and spending choices. If we are more conscious of the other side of the story, we are more able to decide what things we truly support. I connected to this project on a personal level mostly because of its open topic. Because we got to choose our own topic, I got to work on something that I really care about. I am very interested in food and our food system, and do my best to eat healthily and locally, so it was easy for me to become connected to a project about food. I was able to really enjoy my research and writing, especially the creation and delivery of my oral piece. I thought that learning about these topics was interesting enough, but my real favorite part was trying to make other people understand what I had learned, especially through my oral project. Probably the reason that this was my favorite part is that I wasnt just doing it to get a good grade; I really wanted to convince the audience to change the way they eat. I feel that it was so easy to connect to this project mostly because it could be about just about anything. This let me choose something that I actually care about. For me, the hardest part of this project was absolutely the op-ed. I had a very hard time trying to connect my ideas, and even in my final draft, my thesis is kind of unclear. I think that the main reason for this is that I tried to do too much with a short op-ed. I watched a very all-inclusive movie about food,

which gave me about a million different things that I wanted to touch on in my op-ed. Unfortunately, I only had 1,000 words in which to somehow craft these things in to a compelling perspective. I was largely unsuccessful in this regard, and my final piece reflects this problem clearly. Taking this in to account, I think that if I could do this project over again, I would do it on something other than food, some area where I have a very focused and clear bias. I dont think I wouldve wanted to do something political like gun control, but I couldve done something environmental like global warming. I have a very clear bias on environmental issues, and I think that I couldve made a much more concise and focused op-ed on this topic. There are many things that Ive learned about my own Ideology, some broad, some more specific to my project. One of the broader things that Ive learned is that Im not a capitalist. After examining American history and hearing some of my classmates projects, Im convinced that capitalism is skewed. To me it seems like capitalism is an extremely un-sustainable system. It has too many flaws, too many people oppressed by it. Any system that oppresses 99% of the population is bound to fail eventually in my opinion, as it should. Some of the relatively unrelated things that Ive learned about my own ideology as it relates to food is that its just as important to buy local as it is to buy healthy. As much as I dont like industrial capitalism, I think that local capitalism could actually work. I was mostly telling people to buy local because local food is more sustainable and healthy, but its also very important for building a strong economy and becoming independent from some child labor factory in China.