Synthesis Paper Draft

 This week's peer review activity is an Observational Review, meaning that you will be supporting each other's writing by offering specific observations (based on the questions below).  This is not a critiquing exercise.  Your role as a reviewer is to help the writer understand how their ideas came across to you.  This is a hugely helpful exercise for the writer.  For most of us, our ideas make sense to us because we know what we mean.  And it really helps to have someone say back to us what they heard.  That helps us understand what and where to revise.

Directions:

1. Upload a link to your synthesis paper by Friday at 11:59pm.

2. Respond to two classmate papers, answering the following 3 questions:

a. What do you understand to be the main argument/claim of this paper?

b. What main ideas support that argument/claim?

c. What additional ideas/resources would further support that claim?  For example, "I saw you used Marx and Smith, but I think Beatty would really help support your point about X by adding X"

Grading:

Uploading your paper--1 point

Thoughtful and substantive response to classmate #1--2 points

Thoughtful and substantive response to classmate #2--2 points

The direction of my paper is very simple. I intend to demonstrate there has been a campaign of Western superiority , a continued effort to disseminate an imperialist narrative that discounts outside influences. This can be seen in many obvious ways commercially, and also in looking backwards rather than forwards; running counter to the ever-present manifesto of ‘progress’ that we feel is a part of our very fiber as Americans.

In an excerpt we read from ‘The ethic of expediency: Classical rhetoric, technology, and the Holocaust’ by Steven Katz, he effectively illustrates how rhetoric can be used in order to change the perceptions of an intended audience in order to further an agenda with minimal resistance. There is a definite objective in his example, where the ‘cargo’ referred to being loaded into train cars is human cargo destined for concentration camps in Nazi Germany. This was intentionally done in order to serve the discourse of the Reichstag. Through deliberate and methodical distribution of media, they were able to make enough of Germany believe steps being taken were necessary and acceptable. Through a campaign of self-determinism based on national identity, they were concurrently able to dehumanize those that could not possibly meet the litmus of this newfound exceptionalism. Once the narrative was being taught in schools, and mothers and fathers were proudly straightening the outfits of their little Hitler youths, it became a sacred duty of every German to pledge themselves to the cause. It was acceptable to demonize those who didn’t, thus clearing the way for countless horrors to be carried out in support of this narrative.

It would be nice to think we are above that, unable to fall victim to these same tools of mass distribution of influential messages that can tip the scales of our morality or thought processes. However, our progress has allowed messages to be delivered to us at a much higher rate and wider variety of media than what was available to Adolph and the Reich. In ‘Multimodal Discourse’, Kress and Van Leeuwen state the following;

“As already mentioned, the stratum of expression needs to be stratified further. Musical performers may need the technicians who record the music on tape and d for preservation and distribution; designers of a product may need the crafts people who produce the prototype of the product, and the other crafts people who produce the moulds for mass production.”