Ethos in Mommy Blogger

     One thing that Matchar does to appeal to Ethos, as it pertains to her credibility, is that she mentions the comment thread that she saw on one of the blogs that reveals that she is not the only “closet non-Mormon reader of Mormon mommy blogs.” What this does for her ethos is show that her experience is more the norm than the exception. This makes her audience realize that what she is saying is applicable to a more general audience, to them.

     She also says that she reads more than one of these blogs. This helps establish her credibility because it shows that she is extremely familiar with her subject. She knows a good representative sample of these blogs, which makes her a good judge.

     Another thing Matchar does is add a rebuttal, bringing up the point that maybe this is just a front and these women’s lives really aren’t as happy as they make it seem on their blogs. What this shows her audience that she has thought about this issue from all perspectives and is a critical, unbiased judge of the situation. 

Reflection on Opinion Editorial

                When I heard that we were writing an opinion editorial, my first thought was that this was going to be really easy: a paragraph or two, just basically state my biased opinions, no research involved and be done! Then I read the sample editorials. Yeah, I realized I was thinking a Dear Abbey column, not an editorial.  This was going to be basically like a standard high school five paragraph essay, which was kind of depressing, because I always had felt so smothered by that form, it just felt like I was filling in the blanks. Then I started writing and reading others and I realized that I had been wrong yet again. In reality, the opinion editorial assignment was halfway between my two mistaken ideas; it was about the length of a standard five paragraph essay, but it was personal, more like a Dear Abbey column. It was really  fun and somewhat liberating to write in first person, using personal examples and talking directly to the audience; I felt like more of me, more of who I am, came out on the paper compared to my more academic style of work, where only my knowledge, or worse only my professor, ends up. I am excited to try to take the more personal aspect (putting more of me on paper) and transferring it to a more academic style.

                Part of the process that I really enjoyed was the freewriting and outlining and it was really fun to watch how my ideas changed throughout the process of writing, from my initial free write to my final draft. I wrote down all these ideas in my free write and outline that had something to do with my basic subject, and then it was basically like doing a puzzle, fitting all of my ideas into an essay that entertained and educated. It was a lot easier than starting from scratch on the first draft.

So, to sum up, the things I really liked about the Op Ed was that I outlined extensively and I was able to be a lot more personal in my writing.  

Final Draft

Amy McLean

Kaleigh Spooner

WRTG 150

September 29, 2014

The Flood of Immorality in the Media

            I am a student, and like all the other students out there, I have watched my fair share of Netflix while procrastinating homework. The struggle is familiar to all of us: you have finished the last season…what do you do now? Aimlessly browsing can lead to you finding your favorite show in the whole world, but most of the time its only fruits are boredom and frustration. So you start looking up the shows that are popular, you know the ones, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, or Game of Thrones. It only takes a few seconds before you are accosted with images that stick in your head long after the episode is over. I’m talking about all the violence and sex that is portrayed in today’s movies and TV shows. Writers and producers today stuff the media to the brim with the “sensational,” crossing lines of traditional values that should not be crossed. This has been coming on since popular media was created; writers wanted to do something different, to make their name in the world, so they would go slightly beyond what society at large taught, blurring the hard lines of morality and trespassing into the gray area. Today it has gone beyond the grey area. The lines are no longer simply blurred; they are gone, erased for all time by the revenue that applying to these base instincts brings in. The media has gone too far in its willingness to portray things that were entirely taboo subjects fifty shades of gray ago. We need morality in the media. We as a society need to reaffirm the limits that once existed on what could and could not be shown on screen, and we as individuals need to reaffirm our limits of what we are willing to watch.

            First of all, what is morality? Websters dictionary defines it as beliefs about what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior; or the degree to which something is right and good. Some might argue that the first definition is all that morality is: a belief. It is nothing but an individual standard and that there is no overarching code of right or wrong that goes beyond one person’s opinion: morality is nothing but an opinion held by a person. George Washington said that “Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.” If people cannot agree on what is right and wrong, crime rates increase and the society becomes less stable. When a society has a clear set of morals, it is more stable and produces a better quality of living for everyone involved.

Our society used to be more united on our morals; they are still reflected in our laws, such as that against murder.  But if we believe that killing is wrong, which is one of the few standards that it seems we can all still agree on, then why do we get such enjoyment out of watching people die? I cannot answer that question and I will not try to, but it is an observable fact that our society is now unable to agree on what is right and wrong, so, for the sake of the argument, I’m going to appeal to religion, which has traditionally been the foundation for common morality. It is recorded in the Bible that God gave ten unchangeable commandments to the children of Israel, two of which were, “thou shalt not kill” and “thou shalt not commit adultery.” In the meridian of time, Christ further emphasized and expanded these commandments to say that you should not be angry or lustful.  When producers choose to show gory violence, viewers are witnessing glorified murder, and is there any question that when TV shows use sex and nudity to attract viewers they are marketing to pure lust?

When you stop to think about it, what these shows appeal to is our basic animal instincts. Animals are driven by instinct to reproduce and hunt and eat. We as humans have been blessed with a higher intellect and should live more altruisticly, not being held captive to our natural instincts. “for the natural man is an enemy to God” if we ever hope to live in Joy as He does, we cannot be constantly catering to our basest instincts. But movies and TV are now constantly relying on these basic animal instincts to obtain viewers. Shows both use sex and violence as tools to obtain viewers, and unfortunately, yes, it works in many cases. However, this use of sensationalism has the potential to destroy creativity in the media. As long as a show has enough “excitement,” often in the form of sex and violence, writers don’t need to have a creative plot or three dimensional characters to keep viewers interested for the whole film or series. We can see this laziness of Hollywood creeping in in different respects as well: there always seems to be nothing but sequels and reboots on the menu of new releases. The media is getting lazy, substituting explosions for plot and love scenes for complex characters. Allowing writing and producers to use sex and violence to get viewers does not encourage writers to reach their artistic potential, instead it encourages them to exert the least amount of effort possible in their writing and creative process.

 I believe that we as a society have grown tired of the laziness that Hollywood is increasingly falling prey to. We hunger for works that entertain without offending, that feed our minds instead of just our carnal instincts. A few movies come to mind that, in the past few years, have had huge commercial and popular success in all age demographics, despite, or perhaps because of, that fact that they were squeaky clean: free of gory violence and overt sexual elements. Frozen, although originally geared toward children, was a success among adults, even those who do not have children to go watch it with. The Lego Movie, a financially successful and popular film, was marketed to young adults as well, even though young adults are the demographic that most of the immoral media we have been discussing is written for. There are also examples of films like The Princess Bride that have remained popular through the chaotic shifting of virtues that characterizes the time that we live in. The popularity of these movies and other clean media sources shows that society at least enjoys, if not craves, cleaner sources of entertainment.        

            In conclusion, the media has crossed lines of what should be shown in terms of sex and violence. These activities are immoral according to God’s laws and we should not be watching them depicted in increasingly vivid ways. I don’t know if we can turn back the tide of increasing immorality in the media, but we can chose not to let it drown us. Find the moral high ground. Rise above the floodwaters. And when the flood is gone, we will remain

GASCAP for OP ED

Here’s a GASCAP for my OpEd, it was actually really helpful to write it out and spend some time thinking about arguments that I could use.

G- generalization:

                I couldn’t really come up with a lot on this one, I could say that because I take offense to the moral degradation of today’s media, everyone does, but that’s not necessarily true, especially after reading forums discussing the subject.

A-Analogy:

This one was easier. I think. If I’m doing it right.

-genuinely creative works that use sex and violence and have high viewers, non-creative works use those devices to try to attract an audience.

-high acceptance rates of movies like frozen which, because they were originally geared toward a younger audience, are free from the objectionable material, but they have gained a large adult and young adult following as well, which could show that our society craves some of this simpler, cleaner entertainment.

-Princess bride. Uses some violence, but it’s not the gory violence in most Movies and TV shows today. It doesn’t really have a lot of dirty jokes, and it is still viewed today for entertainment, not just as a “classic”

S- Sign:

                If we allow violence and sex in the media, we as viewers will become desensitized to it. We already have. Things that are prevalent on screen now, would not have been allowed, or if they had been wouldn’t have been watched. In I Love Lucy, Lucy and her husband always were portrayed with twin beds. Now it is rare to find a movie geared toward adults that don’t have bedroom scenes.

C-Causality:

                If we become ok with these things being portrayed, how much of the same will we be willing to accept, or at least turn a blind eye to, in society at large? We already live a world with very different morals than when our parents grew up, how much is going to change?

A-Authority

                Some people obviously care because they have definitive movie ratings and boards to decide these things. There are statistics of how many movies each year have what ratings

                Also, we are at BYU, so we can quote Divine Authority, like the 10 commandments, two of which are thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not commit adultery. I can quote For the Strength of Youth and Apostles.

P-Principle

                This is a morally driven argument, that entertainment can survive, and should survive without  relying on cheap resources. Those things are wrong, and so are watching them. 

Style Academy: Combining and Imitating Sentences

Well, there’s obviously not going to be lot that will help my writing from just the introduction to the site video, although it was helpful to know how to work the site. I think that working primarily on the sentence level is going to be a very different approach, because in the past, we’ve been taught mostly on the paragraph or essay level and simply told: avoid choppy sentences and run-ons, but focus on having that nice 5 paragraph essay and the sentence structure for your paragraphs. It was pretty easy to combine the sentences when they gave you two or three ideas to meld together, but it was considerably harder when, as in the first sentence of the glasses example, they asked us to combine four or five different ideas. It took me several tries to be able to combine them all into one sentence; I kept attempting to create two.  The imitation was harder. Do we start out by keeping most of the same words and punctuation, but changing the subject and then make it our own from there? Anyway, I think that will be the more effective of the two exercises- once I get the hang of it. 

Thesis Proposal

the pressure for writers to push the envelope and defy social norms has created a popular entertainment culture that is violent and sexual and goes directly against traditional morality.

There has been some agreement in what is “moral” and good to show on screen, due to the fact that we have ratings for our movies and television shows. G being free of any objectionable material, the main ones that the ratings are based on is sex, violence and profanity, R being full of these and only viewable by adults, or those accompanied by adults.

Reasons: there has been an increase in rated R movies, to the point where G and PG films are rare, and then only targeted toward the young child demographic.

Many sitcoms and other television shows now have dirty jokes, or an increase of them, and premarital sexual activity, whereas that was not allowed on television before. Many shows have a TV 14 rating. It is hard to find shows without overt sex and violence in them.

It feels as though these things are the “easy laughs” and the writers aren’t even trying to truly entertain us anymore.

Creativity doesn’t have to be going against society in such a blatant way, things like Japanese haiku or Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, where the strict form gives rise to creativity. 

My Opinion on Op Eds

Here are some of my random thoughts and reactions to the three opinion editorials we were assigned for Friday's class.
First, A Miniskirt, Even With Leggings, Is still a miniskirt. I really liked how she established her credibility in the first paragraph. It was actually something that I noticed in all three of the opinion editorials. Before they launched into their topic, they told you things about them that were relevant to their opinions on the topic. Miniskirt told you that she was a returning student with the benefit of hindsight, so you know that she has a unique perspective of seeing the issue in two different times, with two different types of people. I thought it gave her a very strong argument that she pointed out that the opinions were the same in the seventies even though the dress code has changed since then. At first I was a bit nervous when she introduced her third reason, when she said, "this is not an LDS-based comment." I thought that she was going to completely ignore one of the most recognized reasons why we have the dress code -because we follow LDS standards, but then she gave that reason just enough attention at the end of the essay to let us know that she knew it was a real reason, but not enough attention that it was repetitive. she gave me a new way to look at the dress code and I really liked that.
Second, A Kiss-Less Campus. I didn't really enjoy or agree with this one as much. I can see PDA on campus, and maybe it's because I've been here a year and I'm used to it, but I don't think it's as big of a problem as Kiss-less makes it out to be. One thing that I don't know is right or wrong, but I didn't like was her use of very charged words like "obnoxious" and "annoying". It just made me think that she wasn't a very objective judge of the issue, she was just angry that she couldn't study because people were kissing too loud. She did have a few strong points though. The idea that we should consider our setting before we act, and giving examples of that, gave her a very strong point. She does assume that others have been in the same situations as her, so she relys primarily on anecdotes. I have been in a one of situations before, so I could agree with her, but most of her stories were things that I had never noticed. To her, the problem was "obvious," to me it wasn't.
Third, Wrestling's Dirty Secret. I really enjoyed reading this because it was referenced in the book and I was curious to read the rest of it.  I liked how he told us the background of the issue, and personalized one occurrence of it - Jeff Reese. He also gave practical advise on how to solve the issue - body fat calibration and banning plastic suites.
I thought they were all thought provoking, and gave me new information that I hadn't thought about before.

20 Minute Free Write

For Opinion Editorial

Alright, so here I sit, about to do a free write for the opinion editorial for Writing 150. I need to write an opinion article on an issue that I’m passionate about, with research to back me up. So what am I passionate about? Do I even have passions? That’s getting a little bit too philosophical for this assignment. So, what is an issue that I’m passionate about? I’m passionate about the arts, but I don’t really have any formed opinions on what exactly should be taught in school when it comes to the arts. Let’s just start by listing some issues. Hot topics today are… gay rights, illegal immigration, women and the priesthood, Obamacare, national debt, personal debt, technology in schools, our generation being too “plugged in”, environmental preservation, “fad diets” such as gluten free and Paleo diets, women working vs. being in the home, racial discrimination, body image, and sensationalism of the antics of reality TV actors and child stars. Ok, so of those issues what do I want to write about? The media’s attention to the “crazy acts” of child stars, I know my opinion on that, and there are lots of current examples (Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, Lindsey Lohan, etc.) I believe that the attention paid by the media to the crazy antics of these personalities is ridiculous. These kids keep “pushing the envelope” in order to stay in the public eye. Another thing in the same vein I could talk about is the pressure to keep “pushing the envelope” in theater, television, and music. There is a pressure and norm for writers to do things which haven’t been done before, or which defy current societal norms. Increasingly, media tends to be on the side of the crude or vulgar rather than the creative. Thinking outside the box has led to an entirely new box being constructed; one that goes in opposition to traditional values and to God’s commands. Examples: most comedies, Saturday night live, most Rom Coms, the ever popular 50 shades of grey. Possible Thesis: the pressure for writers to push the envelope and think outside the box has created a popular entertainment culture that is vulgar and crude and goes directly against traditional morality and God’s commandments. 

Introductions

Hello!

A little bit about me...

 My name is Amy McLean, I am from West Jordan, UT (for those of you non-utahites, that's about a half an hour south-west of downtown SLC, and about 10 minutes away from the Oquirrh Mountain Temple.) I am currently a Sophmore, but, no I don't have my major picked out for sure yet. I've thought about a lot of options, but all of them are still up in the air.

I really enjoy...
 the performing arts, musical theater especially. I like both being in musicals and watching them, I've even written a script or two (though nothing refined enough to be produced.)

I waste my time...
reading fantasy books. I'm always up for recomendations...after I get my homework done!

My Expectations and Goals for WRIG 150...
I would like to be able to read and write more effectively. I don't really need to persuade people that often, but I would like to be able to look for these rhetorical devices in what I read to help me make informed decisions. I do have a lot of papers for other classes, and I hope that this will teach me how to write more concisely, clearly, and confidently.