Caption of a Photo

The night lights of Downtown Los Angeles, California; a mesmerizing luminescence that signals to its citizens that the town is still awake and busy even if others are asleep. In tandem with its lights, most of the city is usually as active in the dark as it is in the daylight.

The Routes of Man: Thesis

In Ted Conover's The Routes of Man, Conover explains why the journey to a destination is as, if not more so, interesting as the destination itself, with stories of him going to various places such as Cuzco and Ladakh. In the book, Conover has examples of rhetorical modes as he tells his story. Narration is the first and easiest rhetorical mode to recognize in this book because he is recounting what had happened in his travels. Description would be the next recognizable rhetorical mode since Conover goes into great detail about specific things that he notices throughout each of his journeys like a sloth he had seen in his travels to Cuzco. Definition is another recurring mode that appears when Conover defines foreign terms in his stories that the reader may not be familiar with like "cuy", which means guinea pig. Conover occasionally uses cause and effect whenever he ponders what effects may come as a result of certain actions, like why logging is illegal in Peru. For example, if a group of loggers were sent to a forest to collect lumber, they would destroy the ecosystem of animals that live there; the loggers would eat the animals for sustenance while they remained at the forest, and the lost trees would mean certain animals would need to relocate from their former homes. A simple example of compare and contrast in The Routes of Man is how in recent times, people want to get mahogany wood from South America, but about 500 years ago, Spanish conquistadors arrived on sail boats to take gold back to their homeland. While there are numerous examples of arguments in the book, one such example Conover makes is why there are no road systems to ease land travel. If there was a road plan in construction it would potentially save the time of many drivers going from point a to point b, but there is also a chance that random guerrillas could hijack the roads and extort the drivers for money or destroy the roads, forcing drivers back to using older roads. Conover has used exemplification in order to describe why a truck driver would be important in South America; a big truck is useful for transporting people in addition to cargo and the drivers are intimately familiar with what roads they should use if something happens to one road. Despite the number of examples rhetorical modes found here, the book does not have recognizable examples of process analysis or division and classification, so there are no noted examples of either category.

Learning as Freedom: Precis

In “Learning as Freedom” –an article published on September 5, 2012 in The New York Times—Michael Roth argues that contrary to the “customized playlist of knowledge” (P3) of predesigned systems of education that condense students to one limited field, higher education should act as a doorway to expand our knowledge, skills, and individuality in order for each person to choose his or her own educational path and grow his or her own sense of significance.  Roth supports this claim by using philosopher John Dewey’s definition of education, in which Dewey had said, “’The inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of living is the finest product of schooling,’” the quote meaning that education should be something that a student can use to learn beyond school and continue to expand their knowledge. He also uses a figurative description of education by rhetorically asking “Who wants to attend school to learn to be ‘human capital’?” This is meant to grab people’s attention because from a business standpoint, they are technically resources, but according to Roth and Dewey, workers should feel like individuals who get satisfied accomplishing goals in their workplace. In addition to this, Roth had exemplified some of Dewey’s ideals, saying that no one person was “an expert on everything” and that a flexible, well-rounded person is necessary for any job they may come across before reaching their dream job. Ross concludes his essay stating that an education “is the deepest kind of freedom” and that in its core, is meant to give people significance in their life and work.

Learning as Freedom: Rhetorical Modes

The essay uses the following rhetorical modes:

• Definition
• Figurative Description
• Narration
• Argument
• Division/Classification
• Exemplification