Blog #4

The writers of this text is Carl Herndl and Stuart Brown. Carl Herndl is an English Professor at the University of South Florida and he focuses on science and environmental issues connecting to English. Stuart Brown is the founder of The National Institute for Play and does TED Talks and publicly speaks. The primary audience for this text is other rhetoritians because they specifically go into the environment relating and connecting to rhetoric which is a very detailed subject that wouldn’t necessarily be intended to read by the general public. The text says that rhetoric is the discovery of the possible means of persuasion and a tool that allowed people to explore significant social and moral issues and make wise or prudent decisions. The main argument for this text is about an idea of environmental discourse and the language that’s used to talk about it. The environment that all of us argue and make policy is the product of the discourse about nature established in powerful scientific disciplines in government agencies and nonfiction essays/books. In this reading it has also said that there are three main parts to a rhetorical model of environmental discourse which is Poetic Discourse (Pathos, Regulatory Discourse (Ethos), and Scientific Discourse (Logos). The regulatory discourse relates to making decisions and setting environmental policy. The scientific discourse is the specialized discourse of the environmental sciences. The poetic discourse is the language we use to discuss the beauty, value, and emotional power of nature. The text is trying to show other rhetoritians the side of how rhetorical criticism and environment tie into rhetoric as discourse and language are used. By showing other rhetoritians this text it will expand their thought process on if their reasoning seems correct to them or if they’re wrong.