Vocab: Due Tuesday March 5

A quarter of a century is a phrase with an epochal ring and these last five and twenty years have altered the world more than most.

Empires have waxed and waned; motor cars have altered the whole face of travel and the whole scale of British distances; a penny has become a halfpenny and the char-a'-banc has crashed its way through the silent austerities of the Scottish Sabbath.

Far better to have left the old house to be, in the mind's eye, grandiose, mysterious, abounding in dark possibilities; in short, the half-menacing, half-entrancing monster it used to be.  Far better to have left gardens their flattering spaciousness of boyhood's vision, to the wood its pristine mystery of cavernous and black allure.

AP words (that you should find on your spreadsheet):  personification, parody, allusion and antithesis.

Newspaper Links for "Track a Columnist"

• Jump in!  http://www.blueagle.com/
• Arts and Letters Daily  http://www.aldaily.com/

• The Internet Public Library  http://www.ipl.org/div/news/
• American Journalism Review  http://www.ajr.org
• Pultizer gives prizes for Journalism  http://www.pulitzer.org
• The New York Times www.nytimes.com  

• The Washington Post www.washingtonpost.com  
• The Boston Globe  www.boston.com/globe
• The Nation  http://www.thenation.com/
• Chicago Sun-Times  http://www.suntimes.com/index/
• Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/
• Miami Herald http://www.miami.com/herald/  
• The San Francisco Chronicle  http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
• The Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed
• The  Los Angeles Times, our hometown paper!  http://www.latimes.com
• Conservative columnists:  http://townhall.com/columnists/

Let me know if any of these links are broken, and I'll fix 'em.  :)

Satire: Colbert Report/The Daily Show

Handwritten One-Pager in your notebook on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report -- consisting of three full paragraphs, as follows:

Paragraph One: quick overview that offers the basic information contained in a rhetorical precis.  However, note that  it is NOT necessary to follow the precis form -- DO cite the show title, the date aired, the date you watched, the topics under discussion, the rhetorical situation (in other words, the “occasion”.)  Think through the main idea, the development, the intended audience and the purpose.  The basics.

Paragraph Two:  Specifics:  Memorable jokes and ironic elements.  Who was the guest, and what was the main topic of the show?  Was there a main topic?  How did the host deal with the guest?  (Consider: why would a serious person agree to appear as a guest on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report?)  How do satirical elements interplay with “straight” elements?  For example, both hosts are usually quite courteous to their guests even as they lampoon their ideas.  Watch for this, and if you notice it, see what you can make of it.

Paragraph Three:  Discuss the rhetorical appeals.  How does a satirist utilize logic?  Emotional appeals?  Ethos?  I am especially interested in your thinking on ethos.  Consider this:  viewership among people your age (and a little older) of “straight news” is down.  The young tend to view traditional media with a sense of cynicism, yet Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are very popular and highly respected, even though they identify themselves as comedians.   The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are studied in colleges and universities across the country.  Why?  What is happening?  Is this a case of “amusing ourselves to death,” or is something else happening?

DUE:  Monday, March 4