24. Killing Me Microsoftly

A freewilling address, full of digressions and personal chemistry, to change hearts and minds most effectively, verses Microsoft's PowerPoint. Which seems to be more persuasive and effective? Surprisingly, people choose to look at PowerPoint presentations. What Keller is most worried about is:  "[Microsoft's] attempts to make PowerPoint easier to use, they have all these templates. They totally limit your ability to express yourself. Everybody's using the same color palette. It's one more way to choke the life out of creativity." PowerPoint is getting in our way of expressing our creativity and intelligence. It sets limits and boundaries when people share information or convey messages; it condenses and abbreviates the information. "What sort of world is reflected in PowerPoint? A world stripped down to briefly summarized essences, a world snipped clean of the annoying underbrush of ambiguity and complication. "

What's most impressive about Keller's article is that she referred to many other people such as professors from UCLA, Northwestern University, MIT, and all these amazing universities to get a real scoop of their opinion on PowerPoint. These credible resources boosts up the quality of her article, totally backing up her argument. Although not all of the quotes that she mentions is on her side of the argument, they still provide good reaons, justifying thoroughly for each side. Especially because PowerPoints are used mostly among teachers conveying information to students in lectures, she was smart to interview all these college professors. However if she also interviewed business people or those that are related in marketing that also involves a lot of trade of information through PPt, it could've broadended the reader's perspective of not just judging PPT based on educational uses. Overall I think Keller did a well job to persuade her readers-I really like the mockery tone that she used to criticize Microsoft. It brings interest in to the article as well as persuasion. 

22. On Self-Respect

Didion aspect of how people with and without self-respect act are explained many different times in this article. He first starts out by explaining his own situation that he had when he was rejected to Phi Beta Kappa. Although he somewhat expected it but never thought that he'd actually be rejected to it, he had lost self-respect for himself as well as that innocence he had since a child. He'd been growing up with the innocent belief of children such as if you try hard, things can always work out for you, which is not true in the real world and this brought him down. As he gives his own example of not having self-respect, he moves back and forth to give various explanations of when a person does with and without self-respect. "Self-respect is ... a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts". 

Because not that many of us hear lectures on self-respect, I think Dordion was very passionate about thoroughly explaining what self-respect is and what is when not haveing self-respect. He gave so many definitions and exaples to make the readers understand as he relied on his own experience and the characters of The Great Gatsby. By the end of the article I felt and learned so much about the importance of self-respect. Dordian used long, lengthy sentences, listing all the facts and providing reasons to prove his aspect of self-respect. I think this article is very successful because the author did a very well done job of conveying his main point of the message to the readers, and made sure not to just explain one side of self-respect but both, securing the definition that he gives of self-respect. 

21. How Not to Argue like an Idiot

Nmcdonald's expressed his dissatisfactory view on how Christians try to defend their philosophy. He seems that most of their "logic" isn't credible, due to how they get their words around resulting in having logical fallacies. He claimes that being logical is good, but sometimes they just aren't authoritative. Nmcdonald warns people not to fall prey in to Christianic sermons by listing out all these logical fallacies that he has heard in the past year of how Christians have used their words to persuade people. He lists Ad Hominem, Straw Man, False Analogy, and etc. Then he briefly explains the term, and talks about how he has heard these rhetorical devices being used in real life by Christians.

I think I've heard "Begging the Question" many, many times in my life, but mostly before highschool or when talking with friends. In class we don't try to just assume our premises; we try to exaplain our stance and back it up with evidence. Though when we talk with friends about celebrities, music, books, we make comments without much explanation following the comment because between friends we all expect each other to understand it. For example, if someone hates Justin Bieber, (which I heard more than 10 times this year already) all they'd say is "Oh my gosh I hate him. He's gay!" However not many have gave sufficient evidence or support to prove his gayness.

23. Are the Homeless Crazy?

Despite the factual information of mass losses of houses and jobs in the 1960~70's, people doubt the majority of the homeless people to be former patients of some mental hostpitals that were deinstitutionalized as well in the 1970s. It is clear that although some of the patients might have had no place to go after the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals, many were put in to boarding houses or given low-income housing, therefore there is a less chance that the majority of the homeless were due to deinstitutionalization. The reason why the mentally disabled people were accused of being the reason for having homelesses seems to be because of their powerless stance in the society and how people normally look down on them. Evidence proves that reasons for poverty is primarily due to economical reasons than clinical. The reason why the press demands so much attention for this mental illness issue is because, "mental ilness places the destitute outside the sphere of ordinary life. It personalizes an anguish that is public in its genesis; it individualizes a misery that is both general in cause and geeral in application".

The author of thsi article, Jonathan Kozol, seemed like he had a lot of dissatisfaction of how the mental illnesses were viewed. He first starts out his article by covering the basic background information of how people are seeing the homeless today; that most of them emerged from deinstitutionalized mental hospitls. However, in his following paragraph, he directly counter aruges this stance by firmly stating that "the primary reason is economic rather than clinial". Through his providence of data, numbers, credible sources and even prorviding the approximate time era of when these surverys were taken, his claims are supported thoroughly and enough to be able to persude his readers. Overall I think Kozol did well in persuading his readers with credible evidence and enough explanation to support his arguemnts. His aritcle was not hard to follow at all, and I really liked how his title got my attention.  "Are the Homeless Crazy?" sounds very absurd, as if he was trying to mock those whoever called the homeless crazy.