Final Thoughts

Coming into ILS I had no idea what to expect. A friend of mine told me that in his ILS class they worked on writing one paper the entire time. To be honest I was not looking forward to this. It was a pleasant surprise when I found out we were writing in blogs. I have never written in a public forum such as a blog and I was excited to finally use a blog. I did not expect to learn as much as I did in this class. Never before have I learned about rhetoric like this. This class opened up a whole new world of communication to me. It allowed me to analyze my communication as well as the communication of people around me. Never again will I listen to a politician speak without listening for a straw man fallacy. In the future I will be able to balance the amount of pathos, logos and ethos in my arguments. I learned how to not only speak more effectively, but also listen more effectively to arguments posed by other people. Overall I am very satisfied with what I am taking from this class.

Can Language Capture the Enormity of Experience?

Can Language Capture the Enormity of Experience?

My first impression is no. When thinking of my life experiences I cannot imagine trying to fit them on pages. Personally I like hiking and being outdoors. I really have an appreciation of nature. For me to try to take the beauty, tranquility and the sublime aspects of nature and put them into words would not do them the justice they deserve, especially with my writing and communication skills. I do not believe that anyone has the ability or mastery of language to be able to truly capture an experience such as hiking in the mountains. I know that there are some authors and storytellers that can paint a vivid picture of a scene but in my experiences, nothing can bet the real thing. Although I am more of a visual person, I think that the actual experience is more powerful. It is the experience that inspires a person. The experience is what creates the language in order to try and capture the experience.

Language, when used the right way, can almost capture the experience. Although I don’t think that language can completely capture the experience, I think that language is just as important. Language serves to allow people to live through experiences that they would otherwise not be able to. Language allows people to gain knowledge and wisdom experiences otherwise out of reach for many people. This being said, I believe that a person’s personality and characteristics are based strongly on life experiences. Experiences are something that for the most part have to be first hand.

Closing Thoughts!

In my experience as a student of ILS 200 I have written multiple papers, become a blogger, and fulfilled my Comm. B requirement. More than that, I have grown as a writer by analyzing logos, pathos, and ethos in rhetorical analysis. I really enjoyed being able to do assignments through the blogs because it was nice being able to read other students' interpretations of topics to further develop my own opinions. Plus I thought there was a consistent and appropriate workload throughout the semester. One thing I would have changed this semester is that I would have liked to see more examples of logos, pathos, and ethos in literature. Though I feel i got the overall concepts, I still would have liked to see good/bad examples of rhetoric. Although overall, I really enjoyed being a part of this class.

Language and the Enormity of Experience

Initially upon thinking of the past pieces of literature I’ve read in my life, this question seemed clear to me that language can almost capture the enormity of experience; however, it will still always be impossible to “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” completely. Through infinite description, one can empathize with a character and imagine oneself imbedded in the story, but they will never develop the terrifying or incredible memories that the author may have gone through or written about. I believe it is possible to become completely enveloped in a story and think you know exactly what it feels like to be that person, but it is truly impossible to go through the same experience and live that storyline enough to match the exact feelings of the character.
When I think about the impact of language on a reader, I think of the time I read the book Where the Red Fern Grows in my childhood. Never has a book affected me so much, that I could not keep myself from crying throughout the entire ending. Though I knew it was just a fictional book, for some reason I sympathized so much for the boy and his dogs. To me this was a book that knew its audience, and knew how to communicate effectively to deliver a feeling that could incorporate all the right emotions to truly impact the reader. Hypothetically, though, if this was a true story, I still do not believe that it would be possible to understand the connections and relationships between the characters or the impact of the events, without being there—seeing, feeling, smelling, hearing every interaction taking place.
Likewise, earlier in the semester we heard about the story of Joannie Rochette, who lost her mother before a big Winter Olympic performance. Needless to say, no one will ever relate to the immensity of her experience without having lived it, even through countless interviews and articles about the incident. Her experiences are too unique for anyone to fully understand it through language because it involves all of the senses to fully encompass the entirety of the event.
I believe the impact of language can only go so far. It can evoke empathy and several emotions, but I don’t think it can fully describe the enormity of the experience itself. To be able to say you know exactly how a person feels when their loved one dies is actually rather insensitive because it is impossible to put yourself in someone’s shoes completely. Events can affect one person completely different than the next, and language can often hide or forget about the little aspects of the experience that can only come from being in the situation at the time.

Can language capture the complexity and enormity of experience?

I have not been able to come up with one, definitive answer for this question.  At first, as I reflected on all the books, articles and poems I have read, I thought the answer was surely a yes.  I felt this, and part of me still sees it this way, because there have been many authors –and speakers – who have crafted their language and tone in such a way that I have been driven to shed tears, turn on the lights, laugh out loud, or sigh wistfully while reading or listening to them.  The author’s best shot at connecting with his audience is to choose his words with care and thoughtfulness.  The right words have the power to move the audience, to make them feel like they themselves are immersed in the story, in the characters, and ultimately, in the experiences of what they are reading/hearing.  I always know it’s a great book when I finish it feeling like I know the characters -- as if I could be friends with them in my real life – because I’ve “felt” their pain, laughed at their jokes, “watched” them grow.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that relating to people and emphasizing with their stories, no matter how much emotion it inspires in you, cannot hold a candle to the actual experience.

                Although my eyes may well up with tears every time I read a news article about the death of a soldier and the horrors of war, I will never understand what those soldiers and those communities have gone, and are going, through.  I can gasp in horror and say “how awful” when I see pictures of the victims of war, but I’ll never feel their terror, I’ll never know how petrifying it is to walk through or live in war-torn towns, wondering if myself and my loved ones will live through the day.  There are simply no words that can capture the reality of such a situation.  Similarly, every time I turn on the news there are countless stories of murder, rape, destruction and all sorts of unimaginable events that have occurred since the previous day.  No matter how profoundly language is used, words just cannot capture the suffering and emptiness a parent feels when they have lost a child, whether to accident or a horrific tragedy.  Language can be beautiful and it can speak to the soul, but we can pick ourselves up from words, we can move on from them, leave them behind.  We cannot do that with our memories.  Words may inspire us to feel sympathy and compassion for those parents and soldiers, but at the end of the day, they are just words.  It is not our experience and therefore, not our memories or our pain.

                This, of course, is not strictly limited to experiences of immense sadness.  Someone else’s happiness can never be our own.  If you are anything at all like me, you read travel magazines, look at pictures of beautiful, faraway places and/or enjoy shows like Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern on the Travel Channel.  Reading about, listening to, and even watching someone else’s travel experiences will never be the same as being there and doing those things yourself.  It doesn’t matter how many times someone tells me how majestic the pyramids are, how searing the Sahari may be, or how serene the Indian Ocean looks from the beaches of Phuket.  These stories only make me long for my own experiences at these places, they are not able to capture it well enough to make me feel as if I no longer want or need to travel there.  That’s why I believe that despite languages power to speak to the soul, and sway emotions, words will never be able to capture moments the way first-hand experience will.