Visual Gazes

There are several different types of visual gazes, each with an intended  audience. For example familial gazes make the audience think of memories or familiar things. An example of this is finding your son's baseball mitt and ball on the table, which brings back memories of when you first learned to play ball with your own dad. Another type of gaze is a consumer gaze, which makes the audience want to buy things. When I was little I was really into Pokemon, and when my mom took me to Walmart I would always ask for a pack of cards because they set them out on the bottom shelf near the check out isles, right where I could see them. There are many more kinds of gazes, such as political which makes the audience feel more politically aligned to a party, or national gazes that can make us feel more patriotic. All of these serve to make a reader feel a certain way towards something. It can be very useful in advertising, commercials and especially writing. As a writer you want your reader to think in a certain way towards your work and using different rhetorical gazes can do this.

Cause and Effect

One of the most important tools in writing is cause and effect. Cause and effect is important because it helps the audience with logical sequence. It helps to map out events in an order that is easy for the reader to understand. If an author doesn't use cause and effect in a narrative, the story can get very confusing.

One way you can analyze cause and effect is by first identifying the main events. Then you can find causal chains leading up to and after the main events. Once you find the big events, then you can focus on finding what caused them.

Peer Review

Personally I love peer reviews. It gives me a chance to show my work to my potential audience and get input on how I can improve it. It helps me see any passages that might be confusing because a lot of the time, when I write I automatically assume the reader knows as much as I do about the subject, when in reality they might need a bit of background information. It also gives me a chance to see where I should expand and maybe add some more examples or details.

I think one downfall of peer reviews though is that a lot of times people don't give as much input as they could because they're afraid of being mean. It's ok if you mark up someones paper a ton, we're all grown ups here, we can handle a little constructive critism. You're not doing the writer any favors if you hand them back an unmarked essay. They need to know the areas they should work on. Everyone has things they could improve, but a lot of the time it's hard to see mistakes in your own writing.

Rhetorical Tools

Today in class we talked about a few different rhetorical tools used in narratives. The first was mutability/plasticity. This means the ways the material can be reshaped for different audiences. Plasticity is used all the time in writing, because authors write to try to reach an audience. Sometimes the writing needs to be tweaked a little to better suit a particular audience.  The next one  was piecmeal, which is the way a narrative has been assembled from many different sources and put together. Many writers get  information for their works from a lot of different sources and mold bits of them together to form the tale they want. Windows of opportunity are gaps that can can be filled with other stories or perspectives that might not have been included in the original story. It's like the untold section of a well known story, for example Merlin's childhood and teenage years. Most people know who Merlin is, but not much has been recorded historically about his childhood, which leads into the last tool. The last tool we talked about was open-ended closure, which means that if the reader wants more than what is provided for him, then he's going to have to find it for himself by making it up or even possibly writing it. So if a reader wanted to know more about Merlin's childhood years, the reader could make up his own version of how Merlin grew up or write his own story about the adventures he might have had.

When I first learned about rhetorical tools, I automatically thought of classic fairy tales. I can't think of any other collection of stories that has been retold as many times or in as many different ways. They definitely use all the tools mentioned above. For example,  "The Little Mermaid". The disney version has been molded to better suit a younger audience than the original tale, so it's more kid friendly. The story line is made up of bits and pieces of a couple differents versions of the story, therefore showing an example of piecemeal, and there is a window of opportunity left open because the audience could wonder what happens to Ariel after she marries Prince Eric? Someone must have not been able to stand that open-ended closure, because now there are 2 new "Little Mermaid" movies explaining both Ariel's childhood and her life after she gets married.

Characters Cont.

After thinking about the importance of characters in narratives for the past few days, I've come up with another, possibly better example, than " The Princess Bride". My example is Ethan Hunt from the Mission Impossible series.  His character as a spy affects everything, the plot, setting, theme, all of it. As a spy for IMF, he takes on seemingly impossible missions which is the basis for the plots in all of the movies. The plot is centered around his specific character. Spies seem to travel a lot so the settings for these shows are often in foreign places all over the world, and of course a spy is only as good as his gadgets, which puts the time at present so the tools he uses can be a little more futuristic.

Characters are key to any narrative. Without them, a story would  be like coloring a picture with only a white crayon. You'd have the complete outline, but no real color, nothing to catch the eye. Characters catch the reader. We cheer with the heroes, curse the villians and even fall in love with some of them. Plots and themes revolve around characters and their actions. They affect every part of narrative, which is what makes them one of the essential elements of a narrative.

Characters

Out of all the essential narrative elements we discussed yesterday, I find characters to be the most intriguing. Without characters it'd be hard to write a story. They keep the audience interested and entertained. I love how characters can change, like in a book series where you watch the characters grow and mature. When you see a character overcome so many obstacles, you start to relate to them and feel like you know them. Well at least I do anyways. It's also fun when a character you thought you knew really well surprises you by acting in a different way.

The best example I can think of right now that illustrates this would be "The Princess Bride". Wesley, the main character, changes from being a simple farm boy to becoming a sword wielding, damsel rescuing hero. His character completely changes and it's the change that has all the other characters interested in him. Wesley keeps the audience on their toes guessing as to his identity also. His character changes from being mundane and predictable to exciting and adventurous.