Thursday's Class

Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. One problem: Kirk left the TV on Dharma & Greg while he was talking. Major distraction. It doesn't really matter what was showing on the screen; it was the simple fact that the audience members are like flies who follow bright lights. That portion of his speech zipped across from one ear to the next.

Moral of the story: when speaking, permit no distractions!

Pathos in Papers: The Lost Art of Emotion and Punctuation

It seems that the use of pathos, or emotional appeal to the reader, via punctuation is a lost art. Wysocki and Lynch are fantastic writers on the subject. I personally view there being more to pathos in a paper than just what you read. I believe that pathos appears in what you see as well. The same way one can be emotionally attached by what one says, they can also be emotionally attached by what one sees. Needless to say, our society is based highly on what we see. Who cares if Jessica Simpson has less brain cells than cotton (no, not Hillory's child). She looks good, doesn't she?
I believe that the same should go into a paper's presentation. I don't mean that one should you have 1-inch margins on white paper that's has no creases. That's true, but what I mean is that many professors frown on using exclamation points, or bold face, and underlining in a paper. It's understood that books should be underlined, so by convention we underline those in a paper, but we shouldn't be limited to word art. This artistic form of writing can create pathos with the reader. It speaks about the writers character and introduces a whole new world of comprehension and complexity.

There are two aspects to a paper: that that can be read, and that that can be seen! Bring back the visual paper!