Paper 3 [Two Paragraphs Flushed Out (Intro and Paragraph 2)]

Gerald Lappay

RWS 100

Professor Werry

November 6, 2014

[Insert Title Later]

            The internet can be considered the printing press of our generation. Like the printing press, there were skeptics and advocates – each with their own beliefs that the invention could help or hurt the future. If Clive Thompson, writer of “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Lives for the Better”, can considered an internet advocate -- then Nicholas Carr, writer of the book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” and The Atlantic Article “Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Alternatively, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?)” can be considered an internet skeptic. Carr, who studied at prestigious higher-education institutes such as Dartmouth and Harvard, is one of the big-names of internet skeptics. Both his book and The Atlantic article have been wide topics of discussion regarding the internet’s impact on this generation. While he commends the internet for its wide variety of uses, he also criticizes it for its harmful effects – provided one uses it for a long period of time. These harmful effects aren’t life-threatening. According to Carr, the internet impairs ones cognitive ability, and other quality-of-life functions; and in order to make his case, Carr uses several rhetorical strategies ranging from events in history to personal accounts. In this piece, I will analyze Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for strategies he uses to persuade his readers.

            About three-quarters into “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Carr begins to address his skeptics. “Yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism … the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different” (Carr). Besides directly addressing his skeptics, Carr conveys his emotions to the reader in different ways. Particularly, he compares his feelings towards the internet to that of the 1960’s “classic” 2001: Space Odyssey. Carr claims that his frequent use of the internet messes up his brain how Dave messed up HAL’s circuitry, ultimately shutting HAL down. “ Carr uses 2001: Space Odyssey in both his opening and closing. This could refer to the Aristotelian appeal to Pathos – the way a writer conveys his/her feelings to get a point across to the reader. While several appeals to pathos are present in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, the pathos appeals via 2001: Space Odyssey are quite hard to miss, since they’re very prevalent in this article. While I’m relatively uncultured when it comes to movies from the 1960s, I’m certain that these appeals to pathos are quite effective when it comes to reaching to the reader. In a way, the reader understands Carr’s feelings and sympathizes with them – to an extent. If I knew more about this film, chances are I would sympathize with Carr’s feelings even more.

            Carr spends a few paragraphs on Nietzsche, a German philosopher whose ideals were adopted by the Nazi regime. In Nietzsche’s time [the 1860s], the typewriter was a relatively new invention. Nietzsche struggled with hand cramps, and as such adopted the typewriter as his new medium to continue publishing philosophical texts.

                        But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a                             composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had                          become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument                            even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own                            work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen                            and paper” (Carr).

Carr denotes the changes in Nietzsche’s writing style, all because of the change to a new piece of technology. While it helped Nietzsche to write again, it also hurt his writing style. Carr’s purpose in identifying Nietzsche and his typewriter issues was to 1) connect the typewriter to the internet, as both were relatively new technology in their respective times and 2) show the reader that the internet wasn’t the only piece of technology to affect function.

Paper 3 Draft 1 (1 intro 2 bodies)

Gerald Lappay

RWS 100

Professor Werry

November 3, 2014

[Insert Title Later]

            The internet can be considered the printing press of our generation. Like the printing press, there were skeptics and advocates – each with their own beliefs that the invention could help or hurt the future. If Clive Thompson, writer of “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Lives for the Better”, can considered an internet advocate -- then Nicholas Carr, writer of the book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” and The Atlantic Article “Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Alternatively, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?)” can be considered an internet skeptic. Carr, who studied at prestigious higher-education institutes such as Dartmouth and Harvard, is one of the big-names of internet skeptics. Both his book and The Atlantic article have been wide topics of discussion regarding the internet’s impact on this generation. In this piece, I will analyze Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for strategies he uses to persuade his readers.

            About three-quarters into “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Carr begins to address his skeptics. “Yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism … the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different” (Carr). Besides directly addressing his skeptics, Carr conveys his emotions to the reader in different ways. Particularly, he compares his feelings towards the internet to that of the 1960’s “classic” 2001: Space Odyssey. Carr claims that his frequent use of the internet messes up his brain how Dave messed up HAL’s circuitry, ultimately shutting HAL down. “ Carr uses 2001: Space Odyssey in both his opening and closing. This could refer to the Aristotelian appeal to Pathos – the way a writer conveys his/her feelings to get a point across to the reader. While several appeals to pathos are present in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, the pathos appeals via 2001: Space Odyssey are quite hard to miss, since they’re very prevalent in this article. While I’m relatively uncultured when it comes to movies from the 1960s, I’m certain that these appeals to pathos are quite effective when it comes to reaching to the reader. In a way, the reader understands Carr’s feelings and sympathizes with them – to an extent. If I knew more about this film, chances are I would sympathize with Carr’s feelings even more.

            Nietzsche, a German philosopher whose ideals were adopted by Nazis, is a topic of discussion in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. Carr goes about Nietzsche’s use of the typewriter.

                        But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a                             composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had                          become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument                            even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own                            work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen                            and paper” (Carr).

Carr denotes the changes in Nietzsche’s writing style, all because of the change to a new piece of technology. While it helped Nietzsche to write again, it also hurt his writing style. This kind of identification was a strong way of getting his point across to the reader. While it’s not the internet, I did mention before that in a way, the internet is like today’s typewriter. 

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" [Question Mark?]

Gerald Lappay

RWS 100

Professor Werry

October 29th, 2014

Stupid Google? [Question Mark]

Overall Argument: While the internet and other pieces of technology are super helpful, there are some noticeable downsides that Carr addresses. They aren't life-threatening. More like "quality-of-life" threatening.

1 Main Claim: "I've been spending a lot of time online ... The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer ... But that boon comes at a price ... The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing." (Carr)

Strategy 1: Authorities & Big Names: 2001 Space Odyssey. A movie that I personally dislike, but nevertheless helps the reader connect to his article, especially when it comes to the de-wiring of HAL in comparison the the "de-wiring" of Carr's brain.

Strategy 2: Identification: This is a big one. I'm going to highlight Nietzsche for 1) I lost a few points on my Philosophy midterm because of this [expletive] and 2) because Carr's narrative/identification of the typewriter story works out pretty well. The typewriter helped Nietzsche. A lot. But at what cost? "His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic ... Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche's prose "changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style."" (Carr)  

Strategy 3: Metaphors: Another big one. There's a lot of metaphors in this article, and I'm going to highlight a few: "When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net's image. It injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws." The Internet ... it's becoming our map and our clock, our printing press, and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV." (Carr)

Rhetorical Strategies

Gerald Lappay

RWS 100

Professor Werry

October 27, 2014

Rhetorical Strategies

Parry's "Branding a Condition": I'm hooked onto Parry's use of exemplification in his article, particularly the one he uses with Listerine. It's almost like he's [informally saying]:

      "Let me explain "condition branding" to you. You know that one product you've probably used at least once in your lifetime? Listerine? Yeah, funny story about that. Warner-Lambert, the guy who invented Listerine, initially made Listerine to cure a slew of things. Well, that was a bust. Then this fancy-yet-scary word came about: halitosis. Sounds scary, right? Like some kind of super-life-threatening-Ebola-tier stuff. Well it just means bad breath. So what'd Warner-Lambert do? He flipped the switch on Listerine and called it "THE CURE FOR ALL HALITOSIS". Listerine became a hit, and now it's in shelves all over the place."

While this is super-informal, that's how powerful exemplification can be.

Rifkin's "Change of Heart about Animals": Rifkin called upon a few big names of the food industry in his article -- and calling out big industry is rhetorical strategy. When McDonald's, Burger King, and KFC -- thought to be money making, animal slaughtering, whatever-have-you industries support research on the animals they kill, that raises some interest. It's a pretty powerful rhetorical strategy, it hit me when I first read this article, and it hit me again the second time.

Carey Paper Final Draft

Gerald Lappay

RWS 100

Professor Werry

October 25, 2014

            The Chronicle of Higher Education is one of the largest sources of news and information regarding higher education’s faculty members and administrators. As of the past few years, The Chronicle and other media have been keenly following for-profit colleges – higher education institutes that double as corporations and typically have shareholders backing them. In July of 2010, Kevin Carey, a writer for The Chronicle, produced a piece titled “Why Do You Think They’re Called For-Profit Colleges,” which briefly scrutinizes for-profit colleges as well as attempts to shed some light on them. Some notable topics Carey goes over in “Why Do You Think They’re Called For-Profit Colleges” include: issues with for-profits and the federal government, Michael Clifford, one of the leaders of the for-profit college industry, and traditional institution’s stance against for-profit institutions. These for-profit institutions are reaping in fairly absurd amounts of money. “[The University of] Phoenix alone is on pace to reap $1-billion from Pell Grants this year, along with $4-billion from federal loans. A quarter of all federal aid goes to for-profits, while they enroll only 10 percent of schools” (Carey). Along with the large amounts of money being pulled from the federal government, one must also consider the large amount of defaulting (indebted) students – in particular, those who attend for-profit institutions. A quick Google search can quickly uncover horror stories shared by for-profit graduates about how they won’t be able to repay their growing debts. Getting out of this debt is not easy; sometime around the 1970s began a string of events that ultimately led to college graduates not being able to declare bankruptcy on their student loans. This idea of not being able to declare bankruptcy out of student loans is called nondischargeablility, and was declared by former president George W. Bush. I can’t say that we can all blame the Shrub; it’s just a matter of Bush being president at the time the fed and the banks begged him to declare nondischargeablility on student loans.

            In this essay, I seek to extend and complicate some of the claims Carey forms regarding for-profit colleges using my own speculation and three outside sources. The first source includes “Excerpts from the Government Accountability Report on For-Profit Universities” performed in August of 2010 by the Government Accountability Office (GAO); which took undercover applicants to a variety of for-profit colleges in order to identify the industry’s aggressive and fraudulent recruiting strategies. The second source is a PowerPoint presentation presented during the 2010 Career College Association conference, unveiling the for-profit industry’s new marketing tactics, dubbed “Project Rose 2010”. As a side note, the CCA changed their name to the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU), whose new goal is to “develop a globally competitive workforce and enable all students to achieve their educational and career dreams” (APSCU Mission). My final outside source is another article found in The Chronicle of Higher Education written by Joshua Woods, who received a doctorate in Sociology at Michigan State University, titled “Opportunity, Ease, Encouragement, and Shame: a Short Course in Pitching For-Profit Education.” This piece briefly summarizes the early struggles of for-profit struggles and introduces Woods’ own investigations on for-profit institutions. These three outside sources not only extend, but illustrate Carey’s “horror stories of aggressive recruiter’s inducting students to take out huge loans for nearly worthless degrees,” (Carey).

            As noted by Carey, “stories of aggressive recruiters inducing students to take out huge loans for nearly worthless degrees are filling the news.” Carey claims that there’s something suspicious about the for-profit industry’s recruiters that leads to students taking out absurd federal loans. Do they threaten potential students? Are they master rhetoricians? Or are they simply following a strict script & policy? This leads to the question: how aggressive are these for-profit recruiters? The GAO (Government Accountability Office) sent undercover applicants to 15 for-profit colleges to investigate fraudulent marketing practices. “Often called the “conventional watchdog,” the GAO investigates how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars” (About GAO).

                        Our covert testing at 15 for-profit colleges found that four colleges encouraged                             fraudulent practices, such as encouraging students to submit false information                                about their financial status. In addition all 15 colleges made some type of                                             deceptive or otherwise questionable statement to undercover applicants, such as                              misrepresenting the applicant’s likely salary … and not providing clear                                            information about the college’s graduation rate. A small beauty college told our                                   applicant that barbers can earn $150,000 to $250,000 a year. While this may be                                     true in exceptional circumstances, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports                              that 90 percent of barbers make less than $43,00 a year (GAO).

Not only do the GAO’s findings regarding these practices illustrate Carey’s argument of aggressive recruiters, they also extend this idea by including some of the wild claims for-profit colleges form to attract potential students. Carey generalizes these recruiting practices as “aggressive” when the report shows there’s much more to it. Suggesting someone to falsify their received income and liquid assets just to gain more access to federal funds is way more than aggressive. Recruiters alluding to students that attending their university can net six-figure wages for working as something menial like a barber is unbelievable. Carey should have taken more time looking into the for-profit industry’s recruiting strategies before labeling them off as something simple like “aggressive”.

            The horror stories don’t stop at just aggressive recruiters and fraudulent practices. The language used by the corporations and shareholders of these for-profit institutions can imply that they treat their students simply as a source of capital. Every year, the CCA (Career College Association, now known as the APSCU (Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities), holds meetings to discuss for-profit colleges. In 2010, they introduced “Project Rose”; a project whose objective was to change the media’s way of thinking of the for-profit industry. “Instead of ‘call centers’ say ‘enrollment assistance center’ … ‘prospective students’ instead of ‘target audience’ … ‘home office’ instead of ‘corporate’ … ‘salary component’ instead of ‘commissions’” (Project Rose). Not only does the APSCU’s language extend Carey’s claims of assertive recruiters, it also challenges Carey’s claim of “traditional institutions having very little evidence against for-profit colleges” (Carey). Project Rose is evidence that can be used to “question the quality of for-profit degrees” (Carey). Carey claims that traditional institutions’ only form of rebuttal against for-profits is the issue of accreditation. Since for-profits earn accreditation the same way traditional institutions do, obtaining accreditation shouldn’t be a point of questioning for-profits. Carey briefly admits this, describing accreditation as “a taxicab medallion, available for bidding on the open market” (Carey). What should be questioned is how associations like the APSCU treat their clients. Taking a look at the Project Rose presentation, there’s a range of evidence from vocabulary to potential policy changes. There’s plenty of evidence that points against for-profits that Carey doesn’t take the time to investigate, which is a potential flaw in his article.

            Joshua Woods is another writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education with a doctorate in sociology. Woods claims that “all a college must do to boost enrollments is tap into a student’s personal aspirations and cultivate overconfidence with a little courage and persuasion” (Woods). Woods took on the persona of a persona of a high-school graduate in his early 30s who wanted a new job and had dreams of becoming a corporate executive. “The premise of the experiment was simple: How would colleges respond to a student like me? In almost all cases, I filled out an online form, which asked for my name, contact information, and level of education and work experience. Whenever possible, I included the following message: "i want to get MBa but i only graduated highshol in many years ago in 1992 i work contruction now can you help me?"” (Woods) Woods submitted the applications and waited for a month. He received at least three responses from different for-profit colleges, including big names such as: ITT Technical Institute, Corinthian College (which has closed many of its doors), and the University of Phoenix. Among these responses, Woods identified strategies for-profit colleges used to persuade him.

                        The "guidance counselors" employed four basic sales themes: opportunity, ease,                             encouragement, and shame … In a few cases, the advisers asked rhetorical                                     questions about whether I was happy or proud of what I do. Olympia's letter                                     asked, "When someone asks where you work, are you embarrassed to answer? Do                you dream of more? Take the next step: Enroll." (Woods).

            Woods closes with this, “Anyone interested in pursuing a professional career needs a realistic picture of the financial risks involved, as well as the time, patience, and hard work required for success. Many for-profit colleges are offering just the opposite … they inflate the high hopes of many students who may be unlikely to achieve the promised successes.” Author, Joshua Woods, complicates Carey’s argument of “traditional institutions having very little evidence,” by performing his own research on for-profit colleges, which leads to the conclusion that for-profit universities are misleading their potential students by using rhetorical marketing tactics such as guilt-tripping. Again, there’s more evidence against for-profits besides the issue of accreditation. Woods personally investigated for-profit institutions and came up with a whole article’s worth of evidence – mind you, on the same website Carey published his own article.

            All these outside sources support the first half of Carey’s claims. For-profit institutions are a growing problem, especially when it comes to the sheer amount of taxpayer dollars going into. As for the other half of Carey’s claims, they are complicated by the large amount of evidence given in these sources against for-profits. Suggestions to send fraudulent income, aggressive language, and rhetorical encouragement and shame are all tactics used by for-profit colleges to recruit students.

            Carey seems to skimp out on details when it comes to a few of his claims, which is a weakness in his article. While there’s a lot of information on one of the for-profit industry’s leaders Michael Clifford, there’s not a lot about what’s making for-profits such a big deal aside from how much money they’re taking. Nowhere in Carey’s article does it talk about those being affected the most by for-profits – particularly the students and taxpayers. While “Why Do You Think They’re Called For-Profit Colleges?” is a great introduction to the for-profit industry, I believe it doesn’t give the reader a complete understanding of what for-profits do that’s making such a great big media fuss.

Works Cited

·         Excerpts from the Government Accountability Report on For-Profit Universities, August 4, 2010. “For Profit Colleges: Undercover Testing Finds Colleges Encouraged Fraud and Engaged in Deceptive and Questionable Marketing Practices.”

·         Project Rose 2010 Revealed, 2010, David Pauldine, DeVry University, Bob Cohen, and CCA.

·         “Opportunity, Ease, Encouragement, and Shame: a Short Course in Pitching For-Profit Education.” Joshua Woods. January 13, 2006. Chronicle of Higher Education,

·         "About GAO." U.S. GAO -. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Oct. 2014. <http://www.gao.gov/about/index.html>.

·         Carey, Kevin. "Why Do You Think They're Called For-Profit Colleges?" The Chronicle of Higher Education. N.p., 25 July 2010. Web. 27 Oct. 2014. <http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Do-You-Think-Theyre/123660/>.

Draft 1 of Paper 2 [Google Doc]

Draft 1 of Paper 2 regarding Carey.

Prospective Prospectus

Due to formatting issues, I have attached the Microsoft Word version of my Prospectus here.

I  will be bringing a physical copy, as always.