Ethos

I am writing this final assignment, an exploration of Ethos, for English Composition 1213 in spring 2010. I have had graduate assistant instructor Paul Mitchell for my English courses since my first semester at OU in 2009. In one of the first lectures, he explained to his students and I the meanings of Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. Ethos means the character of the author and the impressions of the reader as to the author’s trustworthiness or credibility. I think before he assigns tasks to his students, he usually mentions the importance of Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. The first assignment that I had for English composition was to write a bit about myself and who I am on blogger.com. Well, it was more like what kind of things I think can identify me. I think that the essay itself portrayed the ethos of me. Even though I did not get a great grade for that essay, I still enjoyed writing it. I wrote about my backpack that I have had since 2005. I chose my North Face backpack because I have spent almost five years with it and love to take it with me when I travel around the world. The backpack identifies me as a student and traveler, North Face is a travel product company. Also, I embedded a picture of a poster that is from North Face. It was a depiction of four people climbing Mount Everest with fully packed North Face packs, and full North Face gear, from their toes to their hair. Writing that essay was really fun and easy, because I was writing about myself, I mean, who does not enjoy this; we do not have to really think about it. But, there was a much harder essay from this semester. It was the one where I had to write a Rogerian argument. While writing the Rogerian argument for the first time, I had difficulty narrowing it down to a suitable shared conclusion. I chose to argue that milk is good and milk is bad. Most people might think this is kind a weird topic. But, this debate recently got quite a bit of attention. And, I realized how I happened to feel positively about facts that helped my side, with only a negative attitude toward the points of the other side. I think this society made me and makes me decide one side without negotiating with other sides, because my side is always good, therefore there is no reason to negotiate anything. We as humans drink milk throughout our lives. Most people do not know how the milk is produced and delivered to us. We think we just get milk from convenience stores and that cows are just milked by hand. But, that is not true, nowadays milking is not done by hand, but by machine. Technology really has changed our lives. I still drink milk in some ways, because there are a lot of products that contain milk. If you are interested in what things contain milk, you can research and end up with lots of surprising information. The milk is also the ethos of me. I just realized that milk could be my ethos. I think everything that I wrote for this course could be my ethos.