Confucius’s Virtue-Centered Rhetoric – Huiling Ding

This reading was really interesting to me. I’ve always heard about Confucius, but I never really knew who he was or why he’s so well known. This reading cleared all that up for me. I also found this helpful in terms of layout, since I paid more attention to how this analysis was structured. I got a tip from Samantha about not only paying attention to the content of the articles we’re reading, but also analyzing the structure, and it really does help (thanks Sam)!

Ding starts by talking about comparative rhetoric; defining it and giving a bit of background information on it. Several paragraphs later he begins discussing Confucius. Before going into Confucius’s theories, he gives a bit of background on Confucius’s life and how he developed the ideas he had. After we have the background information and contextual information about his life, Ding moves into how he is going to analyze the work, the Analects. This seemed a bit familiar to me, since this is our next paper – the methods section. After saying how he’s going to analyze the work, Ding analyzes it. He breaks up the work into specific sections, in this case specific words to help narrow down the scope. This helps, since with my topic, Pinterest is a very large social platform, and I need to narrow it down somehow. From here, Ding moves into the conclusion.

Someone once told me when you write a paper, give a speech, or present something, the structure is simple. “Tell them what you’re going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them.” This seemed familiar to me in Ding’s paper, and it makes much more sense now that I’m older and actually moving into writing academic works that require repetition to convey denser ideas. Going back to Ding’s analysis, there were several strategies and quotes that I really liked, and think I might use for my own analysis of Pinterest, when the time comes.

First, I like how he mentions that he had to read the text several times through holistic reading. Since Pinterest isn’t a text so much as a platform, I’m going to spend a lot of time on the site, immersing myself to its ways and really perusing through the boards and what’s pinned to them to get a good working understanding of the culture within Pinterest. Second, an approach I really found fascinating was when Ding mentioned that he went through the text to count the words, but he also used a software to take the first ten to fifteen words before and after the use of the phrase and put them together. This, I think, is a very interesting approach. Third, he uses the words as a major foundation for his analysis. He takes a few words, like “ren”, and really does an in-depth analysis of the word itself, and then relates it back to the Analects and Confucius through its meaning. That, I think, is really cool.

Throughout the paper, Ding mentions things like, “After defining…ren, I returned to…”, and “My analysis…” This helps to reorient the reader and guide them through the paper, and I like that. It’s almost as though his audience is people (or scholars) new to the concepts. Additionally, Ding gave a lot of contextual information to increase understanding. This is especially important to my paper, since Pinterest is growing, it still doesn’t have everyone on it, and many people still don’t know what it is or understand it. He also ties all claims to research, which I know you should do, but I haven’t seen it done quite as well as it was done here. It gives me something to look up to when I write my paper, though it’s a completely different topic.

Ding also does a lot of summarizing at the end of the paper, which is good, because there are a lot of ideas and concepts presented in this paper that could easily be forgotten due to over-information, had Ding not carefully thrown in summaries. Overall this reading really helped increase my understanding of both a methodology section and an in-depth analysis.