2. Content Overview
• My Shift:
“If you’re going through hell,
• The Before
keep going”
• The Shift
• The After
(Winston Churchill)
• The Rhetorical Situation
• Topic, Purpose, and Audience
• Medium and Context
• Rhetorical Strategy
• Description
• Narrative
• Compare and Contrast
• Rhetorical Strategy
• How I Would Tweak It
• Who’s the Audience?
• Summary
4. The Before
• Friends
• Hanging out with the wrong crowd
• Lost touch with a lot of people
• School
• Grades were slipping
• Wasn’t trying
• Lifestyle
• Lived a relatively unhealthy lifestyle
• Overweight
• Outlook on Life
• Why bother?
5. The Shift
• The Realization
• I don’t have to live like this
• My friends and family deserve better
• I need to focus on school
• What I decided to do
• Lose weight
• Became more outgoing
• Focus on school
• Get my act together
6. The After
• Lifestyle
• Lost 50-60 pounds
• Living a healthier lifestyle
• School
• Finished junior year with a 3.8 GPA
• Finished senior year with a 4.2 GPA
• Friends
• Became better friends with people from grade school
• Met new people
• God accepted into UK’s College of Engineering
• Life is good
8. Topic, Audience, Purpose
• Topic
• Why did I go with this topic?
• Audience
• Other college students
• College professor
• Purpose
• To get people to think about if they’re happy or not
• Not happy? Make a change
• Encourage others
• Provide an example to show other’s its possible to change
9. Medium and Context
• Medium
• Podcast Transcript
• Translating it from transcript to blog
• Could not see the response of the audience
• Context
• Time limits
• Podcast
• Put it out there for everybody to listen to
• Had to balance telling a story and persuading my point
11. Description
• What I did
• Went in depth of who I was
• Talked about what I went through
• Described my feelings
• Described some of my thought process
• Why?
• Room full of strangers
• Felt if people got a better idea of who I was, it would be more
meaningful
• To relate to others
12. Narrative/Compare and Contrast
• Narrative
• The whole thing was a story
• Stories within the main story
• High school, surgery, change, etc.
• Why did I decide to tell it like this?
• More personal
• Less formal
• Compare and Contrast
• The whole podcast
• Before vs. After – large scale
• Unhappy vs. Happy
• Before vs. After – small scale
• Individual stories and comparison
• Why did I choose to do it this way?
• Clear points
• You can see shift easily
• Easier to stay on topic
13. Tone and Diction
• Tone
• My tone was very easy going
• More like I was talking to you, than giving a speech
• Diction
• Diction was a balance of formal and informal
• Word choice wasn’t super serious
• Why?
• More relatable
• Less like I was lecturing
15. How Would I Tweak It?
• The main way I would tweak this is based on who the
audience is
• Family/Friends:
• Focus less on who I am
• Not worry about giving such a back story
• Focus more on why relationships were strained with them
• High School students:
• Focus more on how I felt through high school
• Focus more on why it was important that I changed
• Focus more on improving grades for college
17. Main Points
• Purpose
• Encourage others to change their lives if they were unhappy
• Rhetorical Situation
• Context
• Medium
• Audience
• I used many rhetorical strategies
• Narrative
• Description
• Tone/Diction
18. Works Cited
• "If You're Going Through Hell, Keep Going" Winston
Churchill." Forbes. 09 May 2012: n. page. Web. 9 Oct.
2012.
<http://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffloftus/2012/05/09/if-
youre-going-through-hell-keep-going-winston-churchill/>.
Editor's Notes
So to recap my shift, I was at a pretty low point during my first two years of high school. I was hanging out with the wrong, crowd, and I had lost touch with friends from grade school. My grades were slipping, because I wasn’t really trying in high school, which came back to bite me in the future. I was living a pretty crappy lifestyle. At first it wasn’t terrible because of football, but after my surgery I couldn’t play anymore. I ended up being a little bit overweight, and that paired with sleep habits, and being down because of all the stuff I previously mentioned, I had a general “Why bother” outlook on life. I didn’t really care about anything because I didn’t see the point.
The shift came around the end of my sophomore year. It just kinda hit me one day while playing guitar and listening to music. I started to think about how I had been living, and how unhappy I was. I realized how my relationships with others were suffering, and overall I realized that I didn’t have to live like this… I realized that hey, I could change. And that’s what I did. I decided to start living a healthier lifestyle, try to start hanging out with my older friends, actually apply myself in school and just start living an overall better life.
So here I am now. I weigh about 50 or 60 pounds less than I did before, and I started living a healthier life style. I never got to return to football, but that’s alright. I used the extra time I had from not having practices and games to get my act together in school. I finished out my junior year with a 3.8 GPA, and then with an even higher GPA my senior year, at about a 4.2 GPA. I got high enough on the ACT, to get into the College of Engineering here at UK, and got several awards and honors in high school. I even started hanging out with my older friends from grade school, and this allowed me to meet new people as well. Overall I would say life’s going pretty good for me right now
So I decided to go with this topic because I felt like it was something other people would be able to relate to. I realized that my audience consisted mainly of college kids my age that could’ve gone through the exact same things I did. I felt like there were probably people in this room that could have felt, or do feel the same. I wanted to get people thinking about whether they were happy or not. I wanted to encourage people to take a look at their lives, and then realize that if they weren’t happy, that they could make a change. I thought hey maybe if I showed them that I did it, that it’s possible for anybody to do it.
There were two main medium’s during this project… We had to write a transcript of what we were going to say, and then we had to translate that into an oral presentation and post it on our blog. By doing this we were presenting it to almost an unknown audience of sorts, because we couldn’t see get any feedback, or see the audience’s response. The context was kind of similar. We had to do both an oral presentation on the blog, and a transcript. There were time limits as to how long our podcast could be, which also limited the transcript. For mine personally, I had to find the right balance between telling a story and persuading my point at the same time.
So for my podcast I relied on a lot of description. I gave an in depth look as to who I was. I told people what I went through, and described my thoughts and feelings. I had to do this because my audience was a room full of people who didn’t know me. They didn’t know my background or my story, so I had to add that in there so they could make sense of the podcast. Another reason I did this, was I felt that if people got a better idea of who I was, they would take it more seriously, or it would be more meaningful for them. I felt like if they had an idea of who I was, that they could be like “hey that’s not so different from me” and it would be easier to relate
My whole podcast was a giant story. I had smaller stories within it though, such as my time in high school, my surgery, the actual change, and more. All of these were in the first person and only really provided a look into my thoughts and opinions. I used both the past and present tense, showing where I had been, and where I am now. I felt like telling stories made it seem more interesting and personal. If I just sat there and told people my opinion’s, and why they should change their lives, it would be kind of boring. This also allowed me to make it less formal, and make it more personal by just kind of talking to the audienceThe whole podcast was pretty much a big comparison and contrast. I did it on two different scales though, large scale, basically my outlook on life, and then small scale, such as me and my friends, school, lifestyle etc. I wanted to do it like this because I felt like it made the podcast clearer and easier to follow. Using this method kind of highlights my shift, and makes that clear as well. Also since I was showing the differences, doing it in the way I did it made it easier to stay on topic, cause I knew exactly what I had to address, and so did the audience.
and Diction – So basically my tone and diction choice was pretty simple. I wanted to sound very easy going, basically like I was just talking to you. I had to balance telling the stories to you like I knew you, and like I didn’t know you. To do this I also used a balance of both formal and informal diction. I felt like this would make the whole thing more relatable if I did it this way, which is why I did it. I didn’t want it to seem like I was lecturing the audience, I wanted it to seem more like a conversation with them.
I guess the reasons for tweaking this would basically depend on who I was trying to appeal to. If I was trying to appeal to my family and friends I wouldn’t have to go into the detail about who I was, or what was going on. I could focus more on why I felt like I did, and why I was doing what I was doing. The other side of this is if I was talking to someone like a group of younger high school students, I could focus more on to how I felt the way I did, and why its important to do well in school.
