I listen to NPR whenever I have a chance. It started off as something to keep me awake when I was driving back home from school...whether it was the 12 hours journey from Indiana or the 6 hour drive from Florida. The news stories are interesting, as are the position essays that people write and have read over the air. Being an English scholar, I value the words, the way they are said, and the thoughts they provoke. That being said...NPR is good at what they do and this morning I was even more amazed at the content aired on Morning Edition.
This morning, two news stories in a row that used rhetorical analysis as the basis for the stories (one on Barak Obama and Cheney's torture debate and the other on Jim Cramer's stock picks). I won't go into full, boring detail about the pieces, because you can read them yourself, but I felt so connected to the tactics NPR used in presenting two stories that could have been done in totally different ways. Using rhetorical analysis as a foundation for the news story is a creative way of getting people to consider other aspects of newsworthy material. Yes, NPR could have gone the old route and simply spouted off the proceedings of the Obama/Cheney debate (which they did, but with the added flare of telling listeners howmany times a specific word was used and why the speaker chose that word) or they could have totally left out the Cramer portion, because all it was only a reporting on two professor's analysis of stock market trends and Cramer's predictions. But no...today's Morning Edition made me proud to be an English scholar and even more proud to be a communications doctoral candidate.
What I do in my research now and how I choose to apply it in the industry or in the classroom is valuable and NPR proved my point today. It totally validated my 90-page Master's thesis on the rhetoric of Nelson Mandela and it gave me that extra umph to love the research my professor's have me do (in the form of daunting term papers) each semester. Thanks, NPR. Keep up the good work. And I will too.
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