The Trouble with Television

• Audience:• Topic: Television Viewing• Position: Con - People should watch less

television

• People spend 5000 hours watching TV

• Instead you could: Earn a college degree (What you stand to gain by agreeing)

• Television discourages hard work

• Programmers hold our attention by keeping things brief.

• They fear losing the viewer’s attention.

• Speculation: Television may contribute to illiteracy.• Fact: There are thirty million illiterate adults in the United

States.

Television viewers are less able to focus

• Everything is fast.“ It has become fashionable to think that, like

fast food, fast ideas are the way to get to a fast-moving impatient public.”

Instant- gratification is badNews is too short- too quickWe think- “Fast ideas are the best ideas”

Rhetorical Questions

• Questions with obvious answers• Make people more likely to agree with later,

more controversial points.• “When before in history has so much

humanity collectively surrendered so much of its leisure to one toy, one mass diversion? When before has virtually an entire nation surrendered itself wholesale to a medium for selling?

Overgeneralization

• Television has absolutely

nopositivequalities !

Reading: Use Clue Words to Distinguish Fact from Opinion

• 1. Commercials and sitcoms offer “neat resolutions” to problems.

• 2. Locate on the Internet, or in another research tool, statistics on illiteracy rates in the United States.

• 3. The image of commandments, written in stone, is extreme,. Also, the words nothing and ever signal an extreme statement.

Literary Analysis : Persuasive Techniques

• 1. A. Food, ideas, an impatient public• B. It equates television (“fast ideas”) with food

that studies show has a negative impact on consumers.

• 2. A. There has probably not been another time in history when one object got so much attention, until now… iWhatever, X whatever.

B. “surrendered so much leisure to one toy” makes audience feel guilty for watching television and persuades them to support the author’s argument.

Literary Analysis: Persuasive Techniques

• 3. A. The word surrendered implies giving something up, having no gumption – a negative trait that might make the audience feel ashamed.

• B. Students who watch a lot of television may feel embarrassed; students who do not watch a lot of television may feel vindicated.

Vocabulary

• 1. F; Concentrating requires focus, not distraction.

• 2. T; A trivial problem would not have a major impact on the way a car functions.

• 3. F; A smell that is spreading is likely to stay around awhile.

• B. 1. c 2. a 3. d

Writing

• Supporting Points• Instant Gratification- short segments lead

to a decreased attention span.• You could be doing better things with your

time.• It can lead to illiteracy

Persuasive Techniques

• Loaded words- surrendered• Appeals to reason• Repetition- fast food, fast ideas, fast-moving• Rhetorical Question- “When before in human

history has so much humanity collectively surrendered so much of its leisure to one toy, one mass diversion?”

Persuasive Techniques• Generalization: “Yet its dominating communications

instrument, its principal form of national linkage, is one that sells neat resolutions to human problems that usually have no neat resolutions.”

• Overgeneralization: “But it has come to be regarded as a given…” “…had bequeathed to us tablets of stone commanding that nothing on television shall ever require more than a few moments’ concentration.

• Statistics: “One study estimates hat some 30 million adult Americans are ‘functionally illiterate’ and cannot read or write well enough to answer a want ad or understand the instructions on a medicine bottle.”