And Your Name Is Jonah

From professor: Your assignment is to analyze a piece of rhetoric (it can be whatever you want--a TV show, a speech, an article, a blog post, even the article you analyzed for your RA, whatever) and then attempt to make an OUTLINE of the piece--the intro, the main points, the conclusion, whether there are pathetic appeals, counterarguments, etc.  Good outlining!

Response: Let's analyze the movie, "And Your Name Is Jonah". It is about a deaf boy (Jonah) who was misdiagnosed as mentally challenged. Three years after living in a mental hospital (pretty sure that's what it was), he was correctly diagnosed as deaf, but was encouraged to learn to lip read and speak and eventually become "hearing". The speech therapists told them that this would help him belong in the world--because the world was meant for hearing people. After several failed speech therapy sessions and family drama, Jonah's mother decided to teach him American Sign Language--something that was a huge controversy at the time. Finally her son could communicate and could "say" everything he wanted to say and be "heard" in the hearing world. 


Introduction--

• talk about the views of deaf people from ignorant hearing people and how ASL was frowned upon
• talk about the controversy between learning to lip read/speak verses sign
• talk about how being deaf and signing does not make you less intelligent or less human

 Main points--

• address the times where communication failed
• misdiagnoses with Jonah's parents and the doctors
• Jonah's hearing aids only made noise louder, but not clear to where he could hear
• speech therapy failed
• when Jonah was being yelled at from a car to get out of the road--led to him falling off his bike
• when Jonah couldn't understand that Spiderman was a "good guy"--put his brother's Spiderman in the oven to get rid of him
• when Jonah's grandfather got a heart attack and died--Jonah didn't understand and searched for him after the funeral
• when Jonah got lost and was taken to a hospital by a police officer--the doctors and nurses thought he was dangerous and crazy
• address the times where communication succeeded
• when notes and interpreters were used to communicate between Jonah's mother (hearing) and her new deaf friends
• the deaf community discussing
• Jonah and his family finally learning to sign

Conclusion--

• Jonah was finally able to learn and communicate to his hearing family
• Jonah felt loved and accepted and thrived with his newfound way of speaking

Pathetic appeals--

• whenever Jonah was labeled as a freak show, crazy, not normal--makes the audience feel sad
• whenever Jonah doesn't understand his surroundings (his father leaving, his dead grandfather)--makes the audience feel sad
• whenever Jonah was accused of "not belonging" (on the streets, playing with other children, being taught to play baseball)--makes the audience feel sad for Jonah and angry at the people who are mean to him
• when Jonah learns sign and can talk to his family and finally tells them that he loves them--makes the audience thrilled and overjoyed (I actually cried at this part...haha)

Counterarguments

• that the world is actually meant for hearing people--to hear alarms, the phone ring, people yelling at you to get your attention from far away, to listen to music...
• in a desperate situation, communication would fail between a hearing person and a deaf person

There we go! I hope I did it correctly haha...but I definitely recommend this movie. It's definitely an eye-opener and very touching.