To help you practice generating an effective appeal to pathos, I’d like you to use the technique of enargeia in the following situation: Imagine that DU’s student paper, the Clarion, is sponsoring a debate within its editorial pages on our university’s requirement that second-year students live on campus, and you’ve been invited to submit a piece. In the next 15-20 minutes, I’d like you to compose an introduction (a few paragraphs or so) in which you vividly narrate or describe an experience you’ve had living in the residence halls that helps your readers see what’s at stake in this issue. Remember that one of the things you can accomplish by using an appeal like enargeia is that you can stimulate emotions in your reader by representing events so vividly that they recreate the experience for your audience. As you craft this opening narrative, try to invoke your readers' senses—sight, sound, smell, feeling, even taste—and place them in immediate proximity to your past experience as a way to predispose them to accept your position. For an extra challenge, you should imagine your readers to be either hostile (perhaps university administrators?) or indifferent (faculty or students who don’t really care either way) to your position, whichever one you adopt for this exercise.
Post your response here as a comment, and we will review them together as a class.
I am a University student who has never lived on campus by choice and by my economic situation. I come from a background where I was on free-and-reduced lunch from my school district, where one quarter could pay for an entire meal. My family has never made extravagant purchases, and we have always counted our pennies in order to pay for our bills. When the economy made the downturn in 2007/2008, my family was living paycheck to severance, because three of my family members (including myself) had been laid off. I understand what it means to live month to month on an extremely limited income.
ReplyDeleteI am also a caretaker for my family. I take care of my grandparents with their healthcare and normal household care. I manage their medicines and will go with them to doctor’s appointments to advocate for their health issues. I also cook and clean for them as they are becoming less mobile and slower with age. My grandparents are becoming more dependent on family to care for them, and I cannot move farther away without giving up some responsibility to them. Morally, my family comes before education in priorities.
The University of Denver’s requirement for second year students to live on campus is impossible for me- what money do I have to pay for living in dorms that would give me less care than living with my family? If I am already living to paycheck to paycheck with student loans, why can the University make me pay for living on campus? We must remember that the University will not pay for living on campus, and so would force extra money from the pockets of families to separate students to create a ‘forced’ community. I believe that the University of Denver has no right in forcing me to pay and live in a small single room so that they can collect more tuition and money while separating me from my familial responsibilities. My priorities as a caretaker come before anything that the University of Denver says that would force me to make my responsibilities suffer.
As I attempted to catch my breath after lugging my whole life’s worth of belongings into my Freshman dorm, I caught a whiff of mothballs, and in charged my new roommate. She flung herself at me in a hug and smelled faintly of onions and fish sticks. At least she lived on the opposite side if the room, right? Wrong. My new roommate quickly got caught up in her newly achieved freedom, she experimented with her sexuality and began drinking every night. She threw up on my floor one night—too drunk to notice—and I thought that was the last straw. Wrong again. She got in a fight with her then girlfriend one night and as I entered the dorm I could hear her screaming from two floors below. I dreaded walking up the stairs, so I took my time. The yelling got progressively louder as I dragged my feet up each step. I gently opened the door to see if I could fix the damage. She reeled around, screamed some curse words at me, and threw a glass bottle at my head. The bottle hit me, then shattered on the ground. I turned around and walked to the Office of Housing to have her removed from our room immediately. The school was terribly apologetic and promised it would not happen again. My next roommate was very sweet, but drank every night. She had a terrible tendency to remove all her clothing when drunk and then attempt to run out into public. She always had friends over drinking so I never had a moment of quiet to myself. I also spent most nights trying to convince her that nudity in public is not socially acceptable.
ReplyDeleteAfter two bad experiences with roommates, can you blame me for wanting to live by myself? It is not asking too much to give all of us brave freshman the choice to live on our own after enduring the chaotic setting of a Freshman Dorm for one year. We should grant students that enjoy living in dorms the choice to live in them their second year, and those who had a bad experience like me can go off and live in peace and quiet. For me, an entire year of complete annoyance got in the way of my college studies, which is, after all, the point of being in college. So being forced to live in that setting for a second year would not be enjoyable for me AND it would negatively impact my grades. I understand that keeping students in dorms keeps them close and in theory out of trouble. But living in my own apartment this year has kept me so much more focused and away from temptations like alcohol and partying that I would never even consider going back and living in the dorms.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteA freshman dorm, while it is a place to build community and life long friendships, it is also a place of germ spreading, noise and community bathrooms. As a freshman, I have appreciated my time in Jmac. My roommate and I get along well and my floor in a way has become a family. We trust each other with anything and even have family meals in the dining hall. However, even though the community feeling is nice, it is still a dorm. Illness spreads like wildfire though the halls because everyone is living so closely together in a dorm in which the heaters don’t work and the seals on the windows are less than satisfactory. Just imagine for a second, walking into the dorm on a Friday night. If you are not a little bit frightened, you should be. Take a walk with me thought the hall for one minute. The first thing you smell, the odor of dirty laundry from the room that is never cleaned, the burnt meal someone tried to make in the microwave and the overwhelming scent of fabreeze which was used to try to cover up the still lingering smell of weed. What do you see? Well on a weekend night, drunkenness of course with all its glory, with no RA in sight. People puking on the floor, people being written on while passed out on the couch and drunken light saber fights occur on almost a daily basis. What do you hear, the sound of bouncing basketballs and blaring techno music from the room above. Safe to say, Saturday nights in a dorm can be, well, sharing the resemblance of the mix of a war zone and a jungle. While I would not trade living in a dorm my freshman year for anything, by sophomore year, I will be over it. The benefits of living near a dining hall, class and the library do not outweigh the thoughts of being sick all the time and never being able to sleep because of the noise in the hallway. If I wanted to live in a 13x10 foot box with another person, I could do so for half the cost off campus somewhere, and I would probably even have my won kitchen and bathroom. Freshman benefit from living in dorms, to adjust to college life and not have to worry about things like rent and living truly on your own. However, by sophomore year, student should be able to have the option to live off campus. Those who want to continue to live in a dorm environment for whichever reasons they want may do so. But for those who are just over it and don’t see the benefits of such an expensive box, should have the option to move off campus.
ReplyDeleteIt’s about 3 in the morning, just a few hours before the always difficult Monday school day begins. I lay in my bunked bed, staring at the ceiling that is just a few close inches away. I can hear the rhythmic snores coming from the bed below me, in an annoyingly timely manner. As I look at the clock on the desk of my roommate that is fast asleep, I cringe at the thought of the night slipping away without falling asleep. My other roommate sits at her desk, with an unnecessary amount of lights on to illuminate her computer; she is watching youtube videos, unaware of her volume of laughter. Outside my door are the two dorm elevators. When they are not being called to other floors, they automatically stop at the fifth floor and abruptly open and close every few minutes. Living in room 518, I have the luxury of listening to the movement of those heavy moving doors all night long. Also outside my door in the hallway, is my next door neighbor having a heated argument with his girlfriend of 2 months. From what I can hear, she was tagged in a picture on facebook at the same party that her ex had attended.
ReplyDeleteDU prides itself on creating well-rounded individuals who upon graduation are ready and eager to confront the challenges the “real world” brings. However, by insulating students in an insulated dorm environment for two whole years, students are often at a disadvantage when it comes time to leave the dorms and really start living on their own. In my experience, dorm life is essentially like living at a gross summer camp for two whole years. You wake up bright and early and hit the disgusting public bathroom facilities complete with the occasional sighting of fecal matter strewn about here and there. Upon leaving the restrooms feeling more or less clean than when you entered, you get dressed and head to breakfast. Sounds like a relatively normal morning routine, right? Yes and no. While you’ve had the opportunity to shower and eat, you haven’t had to clean the shower or cook your own food. You haven’t had to manage paying household bills or mowing the lawn. You’ve essentially become “roboticized” by the DU Housing and Residential Education staff. Your entire day is dictated by others – when you can and can not use the restroom, the volume and timing of when you may play your music, etc…. By the end of the day you feel dehumanized and have lost all sense of individuality.
ReplyDeleteI’ve had a great experience living in the dorms so far. My roommate is very similar to me and we get along great. I have friends who were less fortunate, but most of them were able to change roommates without too much hassle. Personally, the second year live in policy makes no difference to me, as I won’t be living in the dorms next year but if I did have to live in the dorms next year, I’d be very upset. I think it should be the student’s choice to live on or off campus during their second year. Forcing students who do not wish to live on campus to live in the dorms for a second year seems unintuitive. If the university wishes to build community then let the students make their own choices, otherwise the result will be a vile hostility from students who resent having to live on campus. Community cannot be forced, and neither should the choices of students who are trying to grow into responsible adults. You should be free to make your own decisions and be ready to deal with the consequences of your actions. Isn’t that what college is really about? This topic is moot however, as students can go to the housing committee with other planned living situations and get released from their housing contracts, no excuses needed.
ReplyDeleteSo it’s Thursday night at about 11 o’clock, I walk down to the convenient store located in the lobby of the dorms. As I pass through the halls I pass rooms full of people and the smell of weed behind a closed door, I continue towards my final goal of an energy drink to finish studying for the chemistry test I have the next morning. I make it down in to the lobby to see an emt and campus police. From the men’s restroom I hear the girl’s name from across my hall crying in between dry heaves and yacks. Seems a little early in the night for someone to already be heading off to detox. . . Well I might as well grab two since I’ll be asked for a ride to pick her up in the morning from someone in my hall. Oh well I wasn't planning on sleeping tonight anyways.
ReplyDeleteThe first year I attended the University of New Hampshire, it was ranked the 7th largest party school in the US, ahead of both CU Boulder and UMass Amherst. UNH had been in the top ten for about twenty years, only falling to slot 11 and 17 two or three times. The campus aura definitely exemplified this rating.
ReplyDeleteI will never forget the day they installed cameras in the elevators because of a party week’s worth of vomit (Manic Monday, Tipsy Tuesday, Wasted Wednesday, Thirsty Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday Funday). I remember being able to spot the vomit van blocks away and playing games with my friends to see if it would stop at the freshman dorms or the upper quad.
I remember walking home and having a window screen fall on my head as guys from Serc A tried to dispose of their pot and alcohol before their RA found it. I had a Keystone Light drenched shirt that night.
Or the night of the Akon concert when I watched a freshman girl dart away from her friend, face plant into a tree screaming “I’m stronger than you!” and proceeded to get arrested.
Or the same night with the girl on the bus that lost her phone. After her extensive drunken details of the phone’s appearance, we saw it… in her hand.
I remember walking home from the MUB (The student union) on any given Thursday and being handed Pabst Blue Ribbons and Keystone Lights as frat guys made their way from Store Two Four to frat row.
I can still taste the Bacardi that was poured over our rum cake in the dining hall and how I needed a chaser after it. Or the day that the entire dining hall reeked of pot and all the cookies were gone because the servers ate them while preparing other food.
I remember drunken screams on my floor the night before exams and the EMTs constantly visiting my area to remove someone with alcohol poisoning from the freshman dorms (Thank Jesus I didn’t live in those!).
Would I ever try to get rid of these memories? Do I wish I had never seen any of this? HELL NO! I personally believe that living on campus is crucial… for the first year.
Everyone, in my opinion, needs to see someone fall from a doing a keg stand. Everyone needs to see how ridiculous and dangerous the ultimate party scene can be at college. It adds character (not to mention my brother got a job at Raytheon by joking about a party both he and the interviewer attended at Providence College).
But in the second year, it is completely unnecessary. Living in that type of environment for a whole year is one of the reasons why I transferred. There is just something about a vomit stenched restroom at 7am on a Tuesday that is unsettling.
Being in that kind of environment for too long is dangerous. Living one year in it can be very beneficial, but after that people need to learn what it is like to be a real adult. You break the rules? You deal with the cops, not RA’s. You vomit in the bathroom? You clean it up, not just pay a fine.
I am not sure if i should be disappointed or excited that I have to live in the dorms my second year of college. I loved my first year meeting new people, partying with them and having the constant bonding. However, I am 21 now and have lived in a dorm for 5 years due to boarding school. I am ready to move on. I am upset because I don't even have the option of living off campus.I am ready for the different type of lifestyle and challenges that living in a house would provide me with. I am ready to take on more responsibilities and be more independent. I have learned through independence that a lot of growing can be accomplished. When I attended boarding school I was forced to grow up at a younger age and become accoustumed to living with out the watchful eye of my parents. It helped me mature and become more aware of my actions and there consequences.I loved my college dorm because it allowed bonding, partying and the socially conceived norm of college. However, these benefits lose a lot of there value when forced upon you. If I don't have the option of how I want to pursue my college experience especially living wise then I almost feel cheated.
ReplyDeleteI am currently a first year student at the University of Denver, and would have serious issues with the purposed rule that would force all second year students to live on campus. By the second year at college, the University should have faith that the students are mature enough to live in the real world. It is also an issue, because they're leaving out transfer students. I am a 21 year old "first year student" and I feel it would be rediculous to force 21 or 22 year old students to live in dorms with 17 and 18 year olds. The school should have enough faith in their admissions department to be admitting students they deem smart, mature, and practical enough to live off campus. A universities job is to educate their students, not dictate their personal lives.
ReplyDelete