Rhetorical analysis of the topic of procrastination through four sources.

It’s a nice day and so many things to do! Why just not to forget about everything and enjoy live? Often people find themselves in this situation. While sometimes delaying things needed to be done will not hurt, for example don not go food shopping today; the other can lead to failure in life in long term, like if someone postpone to do homework can lead to bad grade and potentially destroy career path. Procrastination is a condition when a person tends to postpone important and urgent things all the time that lead to problems in life and negative phycological behavior.

General audience have negative opinion about procrastination, however, the topic of procrastination raises many discussions. Some authors go more in nuances of the topic and discover positive sides of the phenomena, while others support the public opinion. To be persuasive in texts they appeal to pathos, logos and ethos.

In twitter Daksh Desai @sunnydesai6 a nature and travel photographer/videographer from India tweeted a post “My Procrastination level” where he told people how he reached the bottom point of procrastination for the “20-25 days”. The author is free soul and how the majority of creative people incline to procrastinate. He probably made this post in twitter to call himself to action and he expects some advice from people. By posting this message to the audience he tries to inform it about his terrible situation. The audience is the followers of Daksh: his friends, people different occupations including photographers and videographers as well as random people, occasionally find the article. Usually people share a kind of routine with people who they already know, from this perspective Twitter as a source of message and specific genre is a perfect choice. Through simple, colloquial language as well as quick twitter access the message was effectively transferred right to desirable people’s eyes and inside their minds. The post is a good example of overall people’s negative opinion about procrastination which the author shared and supported.

  The Author supporting his negative attitude to procrastination by appealing to pathos. He  draw a picture of himself as a guy who lost his shape:

“I wanted to play a game and the first thought that came to me was; “I will have to lift the display (hinges) – boot it up and then I felt oh boy! It’s a lot of stuff, let it be let me just sleep”(Desai, 2018).

The author expressed his feeling of anxiety and sense of danger by comparing it to “When a snake bites you and the pace at which poison spreads”. (Desai, 2018) The choice of words as well appeal to the audience’s emotions “let me tell you a RIDICULOUS things”, “anxiety has already KICKED IN BUT”, “I have become like a SLOTH” and etc (Desai, 2018). The feelings that the author tried to raise in audience hearts appealing to pathos helps him to make people a part of his “terrible” situation.

In addition, the author made a little bit effort to convince people about negative procrastination side by address to logos. He said that in 20-25 days no one book was read, he also wrote that his routine was “wake-up-eat-watch something on YouTube/A Series – playing games – sleep”. The logic part of brain will analyze the facts and defiantly tell that the author need help, procrastination will “kill” him.

    Using logos and pathos in the message, the author did not appeal to ethos. However, choosing a right genre to inform his audience, the author will support a common negative belief about procrastination but will not switch it to a different, deeper level of concern.

In the report made by Wasche K. A and his colleagues  about procrastination and self-efficacy: “Tracing vicious and virtuous circles in self-regulated learning” an experiment was conducted in which the authors have confirmed their hypothesis about “virtues circles of procrastination” and “virtues circles of self-efficiency”(Waschle. 2012). In other words, a postponement leads to another postponements and is a cause of unbelieving in success and failure in life and in contrary, with the same mechanism, self-efficiency leads to success in life.

The authors are scientists who had a purpose to convince by showing their audience a long term effect of procrastination. The audience are the people who are interested in educational sciences or any others with strong educational background and ability to understand a specific terminology and dry language with of the scholarly genre – report. The audience in most of cases take in consideration only facts and statistic that makes the scholarly genre ideal to serve the authors purpose to convince.

To build credibility the authors all the time operated to logos. Followed by report style they used statistic analysis and the others scientific methods descriptions and conclusions.

“Thus, students who tended to procrastinate, subsequently experienced less achievement of their learning goals, and this lower goal achievement reinforced their inclination to further procrastinate the study tasks”(Waschle, 2012).

The authors did not appeal to pathos, however appealed to ethos, where they cited conclusions of related study.

“For example, Wolters (2003) found that a general work avoidance orientation, that is, the tendency to minimize the effort one must provide for academic tasks, predicted procrastination in addition to self-efficacy” (Waschle, 2012).

Overall, the scholars genre which authors used effectively convincing the “demanded” audience. However, the next article does not look that persuasive. 

The article published in the magazine Deliberate, Kyle Homer compared “the good” and “the bad” of procrastination. At the end he came to conclusion that “it is better to plane the goal we want to accomplish”. (Homer, no date) The author’s went deep in nuances of procrastination and had a purpose to inform people about them. In this article Homer broke down belief about procrastination as a negative phenomena in society and showed “small glimmer of positivity from our waste of time” (Homer, no date). The audience of the magazine is young people who probably believe in faith and Christianity. However, the article is under one of the section called “Book and culture” that can limit audience by people with specific interest in the topics.  The magazine genre will work the best for the particular audience since magazines implies lots of colorful pictures and glam paper that attracts young people. In addition, the language and the structure of the text is simple that help to deliver information to the youth effectively. The author, by building awareness of a positive sides of procrastination and switched mood of the audience from negative to negative with positive nuances, appeal to pathos.

“Procrastination is viewed as the worst trait of all traits, however many of us never talk about the potential positives of procrastinating. As writer Don Marquis states: “Is procrastination an art form or a cultural nuisance?’(Homer, 2018). The author created a feeling about procrastination as of something scary and destroying.  The same time he raised contradiction when he mentioned about potential positives. In “the bad” part of the article the author used a comparative expression to emphasis a small positive effect of the postponement and the big consequence it rises, that makes the audience feel and maintain accustom negative judgment about the phenomena. “Avoiding large tasks is definitely a positive. However, using small tasks as a sign of success will not help us at all”; “Yes, the under pressure mantra does work from time to time. What we often forget about is that we need perfect conditions for it to work”; “Our brains are destined for survival; creativity is not”. (Homer, 2018). In the text author as well used a lot of non-neutral lexis “a false sense of accomplishment”, “the beauty of the creative process” appealing to pathos however, not much links can be seen that appeal to logos and ethos.

      The only reference the author gave that appealed to ethos “Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.” (qtd. Homer, 2018) is not enough to build strong credibility.  Appealing to logos is also not strong and can be seen only as a logical conclusions. “The levels of stress drive us to finish our work when we wouldn’t have done it before.”

“Secondly, our brains are designed for surviving through any problem or concern. This is usually the last resort when we are stressed. We know we have the resources to procrastinate, so we put the task in the back of our brains.” (Homer, no date)

The author in the article focused more on appealing to pathos rather then logos and ethos. It is seems a right choice considering young audience and the magazine genre. However, the lack of strong evidence as well as the way of comparing bad with good created feelings that even though there are procs that do not worth paying that much attention. At the end the author supported this idea even more by placing the sentence “it is always best to plan the goals we want to accomplish”. One of the cons of procrastination Homer mentioned in his article was creativity, next author, Adam Grant discussed about it in more details.

       Mister Grant in his New York Times article “Why I thought myself to procrastinate” talks about the positive side of procrastinating – creativity. Adam Grant is a professor of management and psychology and he got used to do things far ahead from deadline or “pre-crastinate”. However, in this article he tried to analyses procrastination from different angles and tried to convince this audience that procrastination has a positive effect. He challenged this audience for the very begging and titled this article “Why I taught myself to procrastinate”.  The author built this argumentation on contradiction between “pre-crastionation” and procrastination using his personal experience.

  The audience is a wide range of people mostly with educational background is inclined to trust Mr. Grant since the text published in newspaper genre in such source with high reputation as New Your Times that builds seriousness and credibility in minds of the audience. Language in the genre is simple but the same time operates with terminology “pre-crastination, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc.” and non-neutral lexis.

The author effectively used pathos in this text. To influence on the educated audience appealing to their emotions that it is not easy since it inclined to rely on logic but the author’s work done well. By using the specific lexis Grant forced the audience to be in his shoes “What kind of idiot wrote this garbage?”(about himself)  or “I’ve learned — against my nature”. He also used comparison “progress is like oxygen and postponement is agony”(for him) , “Procrastination as a curse”. As well as effectively used of pathos and ethos (Grant, 2016).

Grant demonstrated numerous among of citations in the article and built by that credibility. Several years ago, he met a creative student who gave him an idea that procrastination brought out more creativity than “pre-crastination”. He was convinced in the phenomena by forcing himself to procrastinate as well as by survey, experiment and testimony from other people’s statement. “Bill Clinton has been described as a ‘chronic procrastinator” who waits until the last minute to revise his speeches. When Katie Couric asked him about it, he replied, “You call it procrastination, I call it thinking.” (Grant, 2016.) He does this by building creditability referencing other experts in the field. For example, he quoted psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik who almost a 100 years ago stated that people had a better memory for incomplete tasks than for complete ones. When we finish a project, we file it away.” (Grant, 2016)

As was mentioned before Grand describes series of experiments and studies appeal to logic. “Over 80 percent of college students are plagued by procrastination, requiring epic all-nighters to finish papers and prepare for tests. Roughly 20 percent of adult’s report being chronic procrastinators” (Grant, 2016). Or this own experience “What I discovered was that in every creative project, there are moments that require thinking more laterally and, yes, more slowly” (Grant, 2016).

In particular he claims that procrastination “it’s a virtue for creativity” (Grant, 2016). He wrote that he has a condition called “pre-crastination” which means “urge to start a task immediately and finish it as soon as possible” (Grant, 2016). However, Grant also claims that a person cannot procrastinate doing for too long. By doing this you risk to lose creative because of lack of time. 

Building rhetorical situation based on credibility to author and his profession background as well as a newspaper genre he used, Grand has reached this purpose. He has shifted common negative believe about procrastination to significant plus of the phenomena comparatively to Homer, who’s proses does not seems matter that much.  Even though Grant believes that procrastination is not a good idea as long as you wait to the last minute (at the end of the article he even gave steps how a person can make a deal with procrastination) he effectively persuaded the audience to pay attention on such as nuance as creativity.

In conclusion, all four authors used a topic of procrastination to pursuit their purposes: Dakshi tired to inform people while Waste and his colleagues had purpose to even deeply convince people in negativity of procrastination and by that support common belief about it. While Homer and Grant turn procrastination to as not that evil as people think with purpose inform (Homer) and convince (Grant) in it. All four authors used appropriate genres to reach their audiences effectively. However, authors Grant and Waste with his colleagues influence more on shifting people opinions than Dakshi and Homer by effectively using rhetorical situation as well as logos, pathos and ethos. Whatever the message and the purpose is, it is very important to elevate rhetorical situation and make a series of right choice to make sure that the message will give desirable effect. 

Bibliography

Daksh, D. 2018. Procrastination. Twitter. Accessed September, 27,

2018. https://twitter.com/sunnydesai6/status/10453678407595..

Grant, A. 2016. Why I thought myself to procrastinate. New York Times. Accessed September, 27, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/why-i-taught-myself-to-procrastinate.html

Homer, K. No date. The pros and cons of Procrastination. Deliberate magazine. Accessed September, 27, 2018. http://www.deliberatemagazine.com/pros-cons-procrastination/

Wasche,K., Allgäuer, A., Lechner, A., Fink, S., Nuckles, M. 2013. Procrastination and self-efficacy: Tracing vicious and virtuous circles in self-regulate learning. Sciencedirect. Accessed September, 17, 2018. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959475213000662