- Ethos “Ladies and gentlemen, I like books.” …. I appeal that I’m a fan of reading to make myself seem more credible
Pathos “And even before I could read I remember pretending to be able to read them by telling the story just from looking at the pictures in the children’s book.” I attempt to tell a personal episode from my childhood to create a personal connection with the reader.
Logos “Literature is a good way to introduce oneself to a foreign language because literature tends to use uncommon words from many different realms of language frequently. Reading books gives the highest return on your time in terms of vocabulary.” Here I use FACTS and LOGIC (to absolutely destroy the left wing) - Summary: Airport scene in the opening of Koimonogatari. Over the phone, Senjougahara and Kaiki agree to meet in a cafe at an airport. Senjougahara states that this will be their first time meeting (which is a lie, they met plenty of times before). Then, she tells Kaiki that she will be wearing glasses in order to make it easier for him to find her. From a distance, Kaiki spots Senjougahara sitting and drinking orange juice in a cafe wearing Groucho glasses. Kaiki took her silly outfit as a challenge, so he bought an Aloha shirt (which is a reference to another character in the story named Oshino). When he sat across the table wearing that Aloha shirt, Senjougahara bursts out laughing, spilling orange juice all over Kaiki’s face. Inside his thoughts Kaiki goes “Hehehe, I won!”. Then Kaiki orders hot coffee and orange juice from a waitress. “It’s been a while, Senshougahara”, “It’s been a while, Suzuki”
Analysis: The airport scene in the opening of Koimonogatari is a satire on people’s lies. Throughout the story, characters tell meaningless lies to each other that end in comedic results. Like in this scene, to meet each other, Senjougahara and Kaiki take a plane all the way to Okinawa (even though they live in the same town), just because they wanted to put up faces of being busy people. Senjougahara wearing Groucho glasses symbolizes that she wants to mask her feelings because she is in a desperate situation. She does that because her pride is too high and she does not want Kaiki to find out, but from the context of the story, he sees right through her facade. Unknowingly, Kaiki ends up buying an Aloha shirt from the exact same mannequin that Senjougahara took her glasses from. This symbolizes that their affinity with each other is good and they didn’t have to mount lies on top of lies to come to an agreement. This scene is making a statement that telling lies to protect one’s pride is really silly. - Writing analysis is way harder than writing a summary. Writing a summary is more fun than writing an analysis. I find it hard to put effort into looking for meaning. Writing analysis is kind of similar to driving while being very sleepy: you have to constantly fight yourself from writing a summary, and when you unknowingly start veering off into summary territory, you have to quickly snap back.
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Thanks for this, Atai– both your summary and your analysis are full of detail. I agree about the challenge; it’s certainly OK to integrate summary and analysis in most cases. And analysis tends to come easier if you have a sense of purpose behind it: if you sense a depth in your text/artifact you’re excited to explore.