ARCS Chapter 5

I am really having a hard time writing these blogs. I am finding that my ENGL 470 class and this one really intertwine, and sometimes it is hard to keep what information came from each class straight! For this particular blog, however, I am going to purposely criss-cross classes because we did an activity in ENGL 470 that I think is very fitting to this week’s reading on Logical Proofs.

In ENGL 470, we were given an excerpt from Shakespear’s Henry V. The excerpt was of Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day Speech. (You Tube and Text.)
And told to go through it to find the different uses of ethos, pathos, and logos; however, I am finding that there are so many uses of the types of logos the book mentions that they are worth pointing out.

MAXIM
There are several examples of what I would consider to be maxims throughout the text, including:
- “God’s will!”
- “Old men forget”
- “This story shall the good man teach his son.”
I think these are examples of maxims because, as the book defines, maxims are “wise sayings or proverbs that are generally accepted by the rhetorician’s community.” (182)

ENTHYMEME
The text also provides a great example of an enthymeme:
“For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother….”

The enthymeme would break down as follows:
Brothers shed blood together
We will shed blood together today
We will be brothers

I think a second example of an enthymeme can be found early in the speech when Shakespeare writes,
“The fewer men, the greater share of honor.”
The enthymeme would break down to (I think?):
We are doing an honorable act
There is a certain amount of honor that will be bestowed upon the men fighting
The less men fighting, the more honorable those fighting will be

Even if this is not an example of an enthymeme, it would still be an example of logos because it is rational.

I apologize for the short blog, but I am really struggling with what to write without summarizing the reading or babbling.