“Choose your battles,” and “don’t sweat the small stuff” is common advice you might hear from your mom about avoiding a lover’s quarrel or letting go of a beef you have with your job. Keeping the peace is an admirable goal, but asking tough questions while seeking truth and justice is far more important at home, in the workplace, or your everyday world. Right away, our text seeks to define the difference between and argument and a fight or a quarrel. “An argument doesn’t imply anger… [an argument is] a productive activity that engages us at high levels of inquiry and critical thinking” (Ramage 2).
This distinction between fighting and discussing to a fruitful end is one which should be embraced at the outset of any debate. When I publically described a blatant and discriminatory experience I had with a local retailer, I wanted to change the way the store responded to similar situations in the future as well as send a message to the tight knit community that discrimination was both recognized as such and would not be tolerated. My friends said I was trying to start a fight.
After prolific discussion I found out that my friends have emotional ties to the mom-and-pop retailer and can relate to some of the financial and customer service struggles they have been having. When my complaint was heard by friends of the establishment, I learned that it felt like an attack to them because they were emotionally connected – not only to my poor experience, but also the outcome - all while not really being a stakeholder in either the original purchase or the profit. When other patrons who had been discriminated against in the same fashion came forward and joined the discussion, their responses were more tempered than my friends despite being directly involved in actual offensive transactions. Though my experience was not a scientific experiment in a controlled environment, I got the sense that those who had something to lose/gain were most interested in a process with a solution than winning a debate about who was or wasn’t a bigot (Ramage 3).
Exploring an argument through discussion, freewriting, or idea mapping are all strategies for generating competing viewpoints for existing arguments (Ramage 25).The ”Believing and Doubting Game” introduced in Chapter 2 asks us to be wholly sympathetic to an idea – then stop – start over – and try to see an idea from a wholly judgmental and critical perspective (Ramage 30). If everyone participating in our critique of customer service at the retailer had taken the time to wholly believe in my experience and identify with my feelings about being treated poorly before chiming in- they might have found themselves more interested in solving the customer service quandary than degrading those who dared to complain. In contrast, if I had been able to see the retailer as a completely objective service provider with no feelings about my personhood one way or the other, I might have accepted that everyone who comes in the door receives poor customer service.
Knowing the context, genre, and implied or stated biases of an article you read in the paper (or a group of friends weighing in on the issues of the day) is key to getting to the heart of an issue and coming up with a solution – not simply winning or losing a fight.
Works Cited
Ramage, John D., et al. Writing Arguments: Rhetoric with Readings. New York. Pearson, 2010. Print.
Your description of complaining about your experience at a local retailer is a perfect example of the rhetorical appeal to pathos. Whenever you write, the consideration of audience is so critical. As you note, you were already thinking about the context, what needed to be said, preventing such an incident from occurring again. You had a logical (logos) response, you had thought it through. You are also a credible person (ethos), you had a personal experience at the store that gave you instant credibility. However, part of your audience had a connection to the store and the proprietors that deeply affected their feelings, emotions, and values. No matter what you did in the other two rhetorical appeals, this third one affected the argument in ways you hadn't planned on. It's an excellent example of how critical it is for all three sides of that rhetorical triangle to be employed in the arguments we write.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, as in this case, it's sometimes almost impossible to even know how your audience might be feeling or thinking about a particular topic.