The Trouble with Television
• Audience:
• Topic: Television Viewing
• Position: Con - People should watch less
television
• People spend 5000 hours watching TV
• Instead you could: Earn a college degree
(What you stand to gain by agreeing)
• Television discourages hard work
• Programmers hold our attention by keeping
things brief.
• They fear losing the viewer’s attention.
• Speculation:
Television may contribute to illiteracy.
• Fact:
There are thirty million illiterate adults in the United
States.
Television viewers are less able to
focus
• Everything is fast.
“ It has become fashionable to think that, like
fast food, fast ideas are the way to get to a
fast-moving impatient public.”
Instant- gratification is bad
News is too short- too quick
We think- “Fast ideas are the best ideas”
Rhetorical Questions
• Questions with obvious answers
• Make people more likely to agree with later,
more controversial points.
• “When before in history has so much
humanity collectively surrendered so much of
its leisure to one toy, one mass diversion?
When before has virtually an entire nation
surrendered itself wholesale to a medium for
selling?
Overgeneralization
• Television has
absolutely
no
positive
qualities !
Reading: Use Clue Words to
Distinguish Fact from Opinion
• 1. Commercials and sitcoms offer “neat
resolutions” to problems.
• 2. Locate on the Internet, or in another research
tool, statistics on illiteracy rates in the United
States.
• 3. The image of commandments, written in stone,
is extreme,. Also, the words nothing and ever
signal an extreme statement.
Literary Analysis : Persuasive
Techniques
• 1. A. Food, ideas, an impatient public
•
B. It equates television (“fast ideas”) with food
that studies show has a negative impact on
consumers.
• 2. A. There has probably not been another time in
history when one object got so much attention,
until now… iWhatever, X whatever.
B. “surrendered so much leisure to one toy”
makes audience feel guilty for watching television
and persuades them to support the author’s
argument.
Literary Analysis: Persuasive
Techniques
• 3. A. The word surrendered implies giving
something up, having no gumption – a
negative trait that might make the audience
feel ashamed.
• B. Students who watch a lot of television may
feel embarrassed; students who do not watch
a lot of television may feel vindicated.
Vocabulary
• 1. F; Concentrating requires focus, not
distraction.
• 2. T; A trivial problem would not have a major
impact on the way a car functions.
• 3. F; A smell that is spreading is likely to stay
around awhile.
• B. 1. c 2. a 3. d
Writing
• Supporting Points
•
Instant Gratification- short segments lead
to a decreased attention span.
•
You could be doing better things with your
time.
•
It can lead to illiteracy
Persuasive Techniques
•
•
•
•
Loaded words- surrendered
Appeals to reason
Repetition- fast food, fast ideas, fast-moving
Rhetorical Question- “When before in human
history has so much humanity collectively
surrendered so much of its leisure to one toy,
one mass diversion?”
Persuasive Techniques
• Generalization: “Yet its dominating communications
instrument, its principal form of national linkage, is one
that sells neat resolutions to human problems that
usually have no neat resolutions.”
• Overgeneralization: “But it has come to be regarded as
a given…” “…had bequeathed to us tablets of stone
commanding that nothing on television shall ever
require more than a few moments’ concentration.
• Statistics: “One study estimates hat some 30 million
adult Americans are ‘functionally illiterate’ and cannot
read or write well enough to answer a want ad or
understand the instructions on a medicine bottle.”