Links to rhetorical tools:

Here are links to the rhetorical tools used in this class:

Schemes & Tropes -- Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca -- Fallacies -- Burke -- Rhetorical Toolbox -- Conspiracy Rhetorics

Monday, February 5, 2018

Duchess Allegedly Donated Seven Inches of Hair

This blog post immediately uses the "Ad Hominem" fallacy - to an extent. The post opens with the writer, Kaiser, attacking Kate about her hair styles: "Back in the first years of marriage, the Duchess of Cambridge’s hair was out of control. I think she got addicted to the volume she achieved with hairpieces and weaves, so she just kept adding more and more until her head looked like a sausage-curled cotton ball. Eventually, she went for a less hilarious look, gently phasing out the tight doll curls and cutting her hair to a more manageable length." The writer decides to open up what seems to be a nice article about Kate with an entire paragraph of hatred. Most of which seems fairly irrelevant. I actually researched this a little bit more and found out that at the beginning of their marriage, Kate had very little control over hair styles and outfit choices and that she had a very strong P.R. team that made a lot of those decisions for her - so we can't blame everything on her.

The second fallacy the blog uses is the "Appeal to Emotion"fallacy. Kaiser moves from outright mocking Kate to doing it in a more subtle way when he/she states: "I have this image of Kate sitting in her Kensington Palace home-salon, being worked on by six hair stylists, and tossing them one of her wiglets: “Give this to the children!” Then she looks in the mirror and says to herself, “My goodness, I am such a selfless person!” In truth, the wigs-for-cancer-patients charities are great and if she really did this, good for her." This seems like a really intentional under-mining of Kate, but it does have a soft side, so the reader would appeal to that chunk of the argument.

The third fallacy that the blog uses is "Amphiboly." This is the most obvious in the conclusion when Kaiser is trying to make a statement, but falls short. He/she says: "PS… I know this “donate her hair to charity” story is about a week old, but here’s a late-breaking Keen Hair update: Kate’s hairdresser Amanda Cook Tucker had to delete her Instagram last week because she posted a photo of the 13 hairbrushes she needed for the Sweden-Norway tour. Tucker posted the photo of the brushes with an eyeroll emoji. Ooooh… that’s interesting." While I can see where Kaiser is going with this statement, it is not something that a reader would find the first try - it took several re-reads to even remotely understand this last statement. This blog post is not short of any examples of several different types of fallacies and the ones it touches on, it touches on very well.


Link: http://www.celebitchy.com/564519/duchess_kate_allegedly_donated_seven_inches_of_hair_to_a_cancer-patient-wig_charity/

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