Once upon a time...

Set in an alternative 1990s Britain, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is like a Greek tragedy, inciting both pity and terror...but also love and compassion. In a review of the novel for The Guardian, M. John Harrison explains that the novel, though often categorized as science fiction, is about life as we all experience it. Harrison ends his review with the following: “It’s about why we don’t explode, why we don’t just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.”

In Against the Gods, Peter L. Bernstein contends that people are not so much risk averse as they are loss averse. We can imagine a few things that would make us feel better, but “the number of things that would make you feel worse is unbounded,” and some losses we know we could never recover from.

As we begin our study of Never Let Me Go, we will look deeply in to what it means to be human, what experiences make us human, and how those experiences are the stories we hold within ourselves. Blog #9 asks you to begin this examination by selecting and analyzing a TED Talk.

1) First, choose one of the TED Talks that deal with storytelling: https://www.ted.com/talks?topics%5B%5D=storytelling

2) After watching your selection, complete a rhetorical analysis of the talk/speaker. Be sure that you include a link to the talk so I can watch it as well. Use the following  to guide your analysis:

- A summary of the talk in your own words, starting with the argument of the talk (the point that the speaker is trying to convince us of) and moving through other ideas of the talk in a sequence of descending importance (your sequence might be different than the sequence of the talk). Don't add commentary at this point, simply recast the original. Remember that there is a transcript  included on the talk's web page so that you can read the talk as well as watch it.

- Analyze how the speaker gets his or her point across by working through the tools that the author uses to illustrate the concepts of the talk (it might be helpful to use the ethos, logos, and pathos breakdown below)

- Analyze your own relationship to the talk. Discuss what made you pick it and how it relates to you (think about some of the concepts we'll cover in this next unit, and also consider ideas we've discussed in the past)

Purpose: Identify what the purpose is of the Ted Talks presentation. What is the speaker attempting to communicate to the audience, and what is he/she hoping to achieve through this communication?

Ethos deals primarily with credibility.: Examine the author’s reputation, authority, and/or expertise.Should we put any stock in what he/she is saying? Why or why not? Identify  elements that contribute to the ethos of the writer/speaker.

Logos is concerned with the logic of the writer’s argument: In considering the writer’s use of logos,  analyze issues such as the quality and quantity of supporting evidence. You may also want to consider any bias that the writer might have toward the subject and the effect of that bias upon the argument being presented. Is the writer’s reasoning sound? How have they structured the arc of the presentation? In short, you will want to address any weaknesses and/or strengths in the logic of the argument. Identify evidence regarding the logos of this presentation.

Pathos deals with emotion: You should identify any attempts on the part of the writer to evoke a particular emotion from the audience. Additionally, you will want to consider whether or not appealing to emotion is an effective strategy for the argument being discussed.Identify examples of how the presenter is appealing to his/her audience’s emotions within his/her presentation.