Chapter 8

Chapter eight focused mainly on the different types of arguments:  explicit and implicit, and their various implementations across different mediums including photographs, music, film, and advertisements. The section on the political advertisements was very interesting, simply because I have been seeing these ads all my life, but never really bothered to try to categorize them or break them down. The power of editing was something that I am coming to realize more and more across all forms of media:  whether this is, as in the text, how the political ad with Eisenhower was edited to make it look like he was actually speaking to "real" Americans, or whether it be a doctored photo or anything else. It is sometimes hard to trust certain things because anything could have been retouched from the original content. Most of the rest of the chapter seemed to be pretty common knowledge or have been things that we have discussed before as with the arguments contained within ads. May be we didn't explicitly go over this aspect of ads, but we did look as magazines before to break down their rhetorical appeals. I did find the section dealing with how arguments can be situated within pictures to be interesting, specifically the bit about how sometimes adding text isn't the best option.