help please (1 Viewer)

[Hallatia]

I have been very stressed about by this and need help more than I would have imagined

my PIP is about the headlines and who decides what is important to us? us or the media?

most of this is to be my own work, with methodologies

but I am struggling with research, I have found some things, books at the state library, but that is all I have, can anyone help me with finding resources, it will be much appreciated

 

[Kulazzi]

One thing you can do is analyse the language and rhetoric (persuasive language) journalists use in order to grab the attention of the reader. For example, most times alliteration is used as well as rhyme. Some even use pun (for example, Honest NY Cabbie a real gem).

So you can do a language analysis. This is a start for your PIP where you can find many books on 'rhetoric' and 'discourse analysis'. This should be a good start in analysing headlines made in the papers. Ideology also comes into play here as well.

You can kind of incorporate time into this and research past Media articles and compare them to the ones which are published today. If you feel confident doing that, then go ahead with it.

I'll type up some more points about ideology, discourse and rhetoric later on. I studied that last semester for a unit and it's basically an analysis of language. Just bear with me for tonight and it should be up by tomorrow morning (hopefully)

 

[Hallatia]

omg! thankyou so much for giving me input, it is much appreciated

 

[Kulazzi]

No worries. Here are some points I highlighted. Now, when you analyse a text, you have to look out for techniques - as I've mentioned before: rhetoric, rhyme, pun, alliteration etc. etc.

I want you to read the following and you can use them as your resource. If you want, they should have a copy in the State Lib (it's a haven of information ) and look more into it if you want because I'll only be typing up what I highlighted and is relevant to your PIP.

Discourse and Social Change
Norman Fairclough
Polity Press, Cambridge
UK, 1992

• P. 36 - Discourse is socially constructive...constituting social subjects, social relations and systems of knowledge and belief, and the study of discourse focuses upon its constructive ideological effects
• Discourse analysis is concernec not only with power relations in discourse, but also with how power relations and power struggle shape and transform the discourse practices of a society or institution
• P. 67 - Discourse as a political practice establishes, sustains and changes power relations and the collective entities (classes, communities, groups) between which power relations obtain.
• Discourse as an ideological institution...is significations generated within power relations as a dimension of the exercise of power and sruggle over power.
• P. 88-89 - Ideologies reside in texts...this is because meanings are produced through interpretations of texts, and texts are open to diverse interpretations which may differ in their ideological import
• P. 91 - Ideologies arise in societies characterized by relations of domination on the basis of class, gender, cultural group, and so forth...

With this book, I recommend you have a look through it. Page 169 onwards will be relevant as the chapter covers "Text Analysis: Constructing Social Reality" as I didn't photocopy any further than that. Notice that ideology, class/status, power, gender and culture are mentioned. These are all concepts you can mention in your PIP and use in your methodology

 

[Kulazzi]

Rhetoric is the art or technique of persuasion, usually through the use of language. Rhetoric is one of the three original liberal arts or trivium (the other members are dialectic and grammar) in Western culture.

Rhetoric concerned itself with persuasion in public and political settings such as assemblies and courts of law. As such, rhetoric is said to flourish in open and democratic societies with rights of free speech, free assembly, and political enfranchisement for some portion of the population.

Today rhetoric is described more broadly as the art or practice of persuasion through any symbolic system, but especially language. Or, rhetoric can be described as the persuasive or "suasory" function of all human action, including symbolic action like language use. Both the terms "rhetoric" and "sophistry" are also used today in a pejorative or dismissive sense, when someone wants to distinguish between "empty" words and action, or between true or accurate information and misinformation, propaganda, or "spin," or to denigrate specific forms of verbal reasoning as spurious. Nonetheless, rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, continues to play an important function in contemporary public life.

Aristotle

Plato's student Aristotle (384-322 BC) famously set forth an extended treatise on rhetoric that still repays careful study today.

Aristotle's treatise on rhetoric is an attempt to systematically describe civic rhetoric as a human art or skill. He identifies three different types of rhetorical proof:

• ethos: how the character and credibility of a speaker influence an audience to consider him to be believable. This could be any position in which the speaker--from being a college professor of the subject, to being an acquaintance of person who experienced the matter in question--knows about the topic.
• pathos: the use of emotional appeals to alter the audience's judgement. This can be done through metaphor, storytelling, or presenting the topic in a way that evokes strong emotions in the audience.
• logos: the use of reasoning, either inductive or deductive, to construct an argument.

Sorry, don't have a source for this but this briefly touches on Rhetoric, Aristotle [history of rhetoric] and the three main appeals [ehtos, pathos, logos] which an author may use to demonstrate rhetoric [i.e. persuasion]

 

[Kulazzi]

I've got two more of Norman Fairclough's books:

• Critical Discourse Analysis: The critical study of language (1995)
• Language and Power (2001)

I really recommend you grab these two and look through them. Fairclough really knows his stuff (hence why I have photocopied pages from three of his books ) and you can really use him as your secondary research. If you can't find these books or can't get a hold of them then let me know and I'll type up my highlighted notes.

 

[Kulazzi]

Using all this secondary information, you can then form your primary methodology and ask certain people questions specifically related to your topic about 'who decides what is important to us: society (I think you should put society in here rather than us) or the media'.

Good luck, I don't think anyone studied language/text in depth in a PIP. That or it's not very commonly done.

 

[Hallatia]

thankyou for all of that, it is much appreciated

I never realised how much my level of english would help me in this, I always just thought I am doing two major works, the extension 2 one is so much easier than this