Woody's World

From Ancient Greece to the late 19th century, rhetoric played a central role in  Western education in  training orators, lawyers, counsellors, historians,  statesmen, and poets. Even high school students were  taught rhetoric.   Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic. It is one  of the three ancient arts  of  discourse. It's aim is to study the capacities of writers  or speakers needed to inform, persuade, or  motivate particular audiences in  specific situations.   Rhetoric typically provides a method for understanding, discovering, and  developing arguments for  particular situations.  According to the art of rhetoric, " argument " is  the activity of logic thus any profitable (good, true, competent,) argument is a manifestation of the  reasoning process.  With the loss of rhetoric in  our modern education system we have also lost or  ...

  I saw a recent article posted on Social Media by a a news aggregation site called "Raw Story". Of course their stories are anything but 'raw'. In fact they aggregate news from AFP and Reuters as well as summarizes news from other sources.   Just like most of the mass media these days, they cite another media outlet (Vanity Fair) who cites two more outlets (Bloomberg & Axios) who then consist of statements like "an anonymous source...", "someone close to the White House said...", or my favorite line the Axios article: "One person who spoke with the president interpreted his thinking this way"   This from Media Bias/Fact check site: "Overall, we rate Raw Story Left Biased based on story selection that favors the left and Mixed for factual reporting due to half-true, false and unproven claims, as well as promotion of mild pseudoscience misinformation."   I see media bias and people's bias going in a ...

This past week of “lock down” I have pretty much cut myself off from the news. I wasn’t super strict with it, I just shut off the TV and steered away from sites online. While some relevant news may have slipped through unintentionally, I just move on. If you haven’t noticed, the sensationalism of today’s mainstream media tends to focus on stories that are geared to make us fearful or emotional. And yet for every negative news story out there, there are a hundred more things happening around us that aren’t necessarily getting coverage. In our technologically connected world it is not so easy to just block out the “news” so how should we consume it without being overwhelmed by it? First, we need to realize that we live in an eternal 24-hour news cycle, which is now more often than not, the same stories are repeated on CNN/Fox, websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Everywhere we go, media follows us and according to some research, this may even be damaging our mental ...

My goal in life is not to be happy but to be useful, to be needed. Because to be useful and needed makes me happy. Happy moments come and go as life comes and goes. When my life is over my happy moments will end but my usefulness can live on. In the lessons I have taught my child, in the knowledge and experience I pass on to others, in the memories and reputation I leave with those who survive me. This is not to say that I do not want to be happy but that my focus is not on immediate happiness itself. For immediacy and happiness both end. My usefulness can also make those around me happy and this adds to my legacy which will survive me. How are you going to remembered by those who survive you? “ What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal. ” - Albert Pike