- I absolutely love the way that Heffernan approached her TEDtalk. She was able to get her main theme across to the listener, that efficiency is not always the best work aspect, by way of storytelling and setting different scenes. In the beginning of her talk, when she first mentioned the supermarket method to have each worker come to be assigned a task and then return for another when finished, I personally thought it was a very good idea. It was not until she made her point that there are always unpredictable aspects to the day when I realized that she was right. The way Heffernan was able to bring forward her argument in a small easy to understand way and then follow it with much bigger real-world examples was brilliant. She also included some very well-timed anecdotes that became very memorable for the audience members. One in particular was around minute 12:50 when she remarked about when efficiency and productivity are the only things valued. Heffernan then stated, “What gets left out? Anything that can’t be measured—which is just about everything that counts”. This made the viewers, especially me, realize that being efficient is not everything and that there are sometimes much more important things than work.
- For question number two, I chose to analyze Renata Salecl’s TEDtalk titled Our Unhealthy Obsession with Choice. It was clever of her to start out with a bunch of quotes about choices and then stating that she was unable to choose the best one. It led into her main idea very well, that humans are very caught up in the need to make the best possible choice and then becoming overridden with anxiety or guilt on whether it was the correct one. She then led into very compelling real-life examples of the anxiety and the fickleness of the human unconscious. The first story she told was perhaps the most memorable to me. When Salecl mentioned her friend at the car dealership who would plant ideas into her customers head and encourage them to make decisions they most likely would not have made on their own. It just goes to show that human choices are impacted by their surroundings and upbringing. She then connects her next two stories by using the idea of anxiety and its connection to predictability, which in turn connects us back to our main idea of choices can be scary but we know we will always be making them. Each of Salecl’s stories blend into each other seamlessly and further proves the point from before while still introducing a similar but new idea. I personally thought it was very well done and created a lot ideas to further ponder.
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Writing and Organizational Cultures
Hi Caitlin,
I completely agree with you that Heffernan’s talk was by far the most engaging. I thought it was also interesting that she brought up the unpredictable elements that occur; many people do not realize how many things can happen in a day to an organization. For your second response, I think people believe that they have to be perfect one hundred percent of the time when that is not the case. We are constantly being influenced by our surroundings, whether it be family, friends, or even strangers. I believe that all of the different options and decisions that we have to make are, to a point, unhealthy. Both pre and post-choice create anxiety and cause us to overthink decisions that should be simple. I thought it was interesting how she brought up the point of self versus social critique as well. I also agree that she had seamless transitions in her speech which kept the talk engaging and interesting.
Hi Caitlin,
Same as you, I really enjoyed Heffernan’s talk. I have to admit I wasn’t interested in her subject from the title alone, but her anecdotes and the way she delivered the speech drew me in and definitely strengthened her argument. She held my attention for the whole 15 minutes, which is hard to do. What I found especially interesting is that the whole world just lived through exactly what she was talking about. We couldn’t predict the pandemic and so many things about life had to change. Humans had to solve problems again.
You mention how Salecl began her speech with quotes. I wasn’t a fan of that. Each quote was interesting, but using quotes about choice to show she couldn’t make a choice felt a bit corny to me. You highlight the part of Salecl’s talk that really struck a chord with me and that’s the story of her friend at the car dealership who could manipulate buyers by tapping into their anxieties about making the right or wrong choice. This example really helped support Salecl’s argument.
Caitlin,
I too immensly enjoyed Heffernan’s TED Talk. She got my attention immediately with well constructed stories that had unexpected results. I thought her style was engaging which made me want to know what she’d say next. Heffernan has an innovative way of looking at things. She posited several questions regarding what we as a society should value. Caitlin, you referenced Heffernan stating “who gets left out?” and pondered the importance of efficiency. I agree that there are more significant matters to address. I also believe that we should be thinking about who we can let in, which speaks to our work on diversity and inclusion.
For many of us, our primary awareness of the concept of “rhetoric” is through the specific example of a “rhetorical question,” such as Heffernan uses in her talk. Think about what a rhetorical question is (a question we don’t really intend for people to respond to) and why we use it (because it helps us to focus our audience’s attention on something we want them to pause and sit with. That actually gives us a pretty good window into what rhetoric is all about–*how* we choose to communicate based on who our audience is and what our purpose is. In the example of a rhetorical question, this approach encourages our audience to slow down because that idea is different from everything else around it (in speech, our voice lifts when we’re asking a question; in a written text on a screen or a page, a question mark calls our attention because it’s a weird squiggly thing that visually jumps out). The use of a question that we don’t actually intend for people to answer, then, is all about communication *strategy.*