HOW TO BE BRILLIANT IN ANY SITUATION

Coming up with creative solutions has more to do with having the right question than having the right answer, as odd as that sounds. Genius, says a Nobel prize-winning physicist, is looking at the same thing as everyone else and seeing something different. These questions help to do that:

Questions for things (for full version see Tagmemic grid in Rhetoric.Discovery and Change by Young, Becker and Pike):

1. What is it in and of itself (What are its features? What features differentiate it from similar things?)

2. How is it changing over time? (How much can it change without becoming something else? What is its position in a temporal sequence?)

3. How is it part of a larger system (either physical or abstract)? (How do its sub-components interact?)

Here's a sample using a Pepsi can, and one based on a videogame

Questions for people/situations (Kenneth Burke's Pentad):

What was the ACT (what)? AGENT (who)? AGENCY (with what/how)?

SCENE (where and when)? PURPOSE (why)?

Short commonsensical answers to the five W's will be pretty useless in generating new ideas, so you can brainstorm multiple answers to each question, but then pick five best and compatible ones to construct 20 "ratios." These allow you to bootstrap your knowledge, taking what you know and making it explicit and accessible. Here's the formula for ratios: What does what we know about______tell us about_________ ? For example, what does what we know about the AGENT (for example the Kate W character in Titanic) tell us about the ACT (her decision not to die). If she's a victim of her benighted time, and just went from obeying daddy and her beau to obeying the Leonardo character, then that's a different act than someone liberated by her self of by Leonardo who chooses to live as a kind of sacrifice that mirrors his. Scan through the ratios looking for interesting, novel and fertile questions.

(For the truly brilliant/obsessed: plug in alternatives into the slots and watch how perspective/judgment shifts, as with the two views of Kate above, one essentially making Leonardo the agent.   Here's a sample based on Lord of the Rings)..

Semiotic Questions (for examining what things "say"):

General questions: Why does this look the way it does? What does the thing say (Be careful about what its owner says it says, especially if the owner says it was chosen for function.)? What group has adopted this thing? Who or what does it NOT go with? What is the thing's relation to prestige/power? What social values, beliefs or it "mythologies" does it reflect? How has the object been advertised (e.g., associated with what images? How do these images relate to the target audience? Have the ads altered your/our view of it?)

Questions for analyzing (and producing) persuasion/propaganda (aka Rhetorical analysis. See Lunsford handout):

1.What is being emphasized? What is being hidden?

2. How does the speaker/writer want to be viewed (ethos)?By what means is this persona achieved? Does your assessment of the person change?

3. What sort of evidence does the author offer (logos)? Data, witnesses, experts? Are the sources of evidence credible? Are the assumptions underlying the argument stated? Supported?

4. Who is the target audience (pathos)? What emotions, beliefs and values does the speaker appeal to? Any powerful statements or images? Style? Metaphor?

5. Is the balance/proportion of ethos, pathos and logos appropriate to audience? (i.e., heavy logos for hostile, heavy pathos for friendly, and balanced for neutral audiences respectively.)

Sample rhetorical analysis of Rev. M. L. King Jr's "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

Highlighted: rational, incremental progress

Deemphasized: militancy, radical change

Ethos: Educated man of the cloth, "patient," reasonable , a moderate (between the Blacks who've given into despair and those who want to go to war), president of SCCL who has kept promise, and like Saint Paul has responded to call for aid and is willing to continue to sacrifice himself for a righteous cause. Opposes violence, hypocrisy, and values justice. His consideration of counter-arguments, agreeing or at least acknowleding their legitimacy, also contributes to the impression that he is objective and thoughtful.

Logos: logical categorization of laws into man-made and natural/divine, just and unjust laws. There are some facts: his description of local political situation, observation that Blacks have waited 340 years for Constitutional rights, his list of the dangers and indignities Blacks routinely endure, historical examples, a quote from a letter, and quotes from religious and philosophical heroes. Some claims, e.g., that people in power never give up that power voluntarily are not supported, but not coincidentally, none may be required.

Pathos: (emotion) I don't have time to answer criticisms but since you have good will and are sincere, I will.

MLK uses identification: we are all clergymen, all love the South, I agree with your call for negotiation. Similarly MLK identifies himself and his movement with heroes that his audience values: the Early Christians martyred opposing Roman gov't injustice, Socrates, Boston Tea Party, Hungarian freedom fighters. You could also think of these people as witnesses of sort, but he does bring in explicit experts: the religious philospher Martin Buber

Emotion is also evoked by his description of suffering ("when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fasthers at will and drown your brothers and sisters at whim"), and through his brilliant use of metaphor: gospel of freedom (note how religion is melded with politics, which are theoretically separated in US), "jetlike speed" vs "horse-and-buggy pace", unjust law is a dam that blocks social progress, streets of South will be flowing with blood, church leaders remain silent "behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows" See the conclusion (a traditional and effective place for metaphors).

Emotion and values are both involved in King's use of God-terms (those for which the audience has such high regard for that they are willing to sacrifice for them): democracy, justice, peace, faith, God, although these are more often alluded to than used directly. God-terms have their corresponding devil terms, which are used more explicitly: outside agitators, superficial analysis, broken promises, despair, injustice. (Actually so skilled is King that he actually can promote a devil term ( "creative tension") and demote a God-term like "order."

Values: outsiders should not meddle, but loyalty, duty, historical precedent, the interrelatedness of all things, and the fact that no American can be an outsider in America, makes it ok. Christianity must be bold and active, on the side of the weak. It's wrong to favor order over justice (note that people then would normally equate the two). No one should have to obey laws they didn't have a say in creating.

Not having done a quantitative study of proportion of ethos, pathos, logos here (and you may have gathered above there's a certain amount of overlap in that the same phrase can have multiple effects/functions), intuitively I'd say that this is fairly balanced, as one would expect with a more or less friendly audience ( especially compared to JFK inaugural, which has almost no logos).