Blogging Rhetorically #3

While reading about Erykah Badu, a singer and dancer, I noticed the way that the author designed the layout of his essay. He used a simple conversational interview with Badu and his own research as a way to portray an informational essay. I was able to directly relate it to our new essay topic. This essay requires us to incorporate an interview with someone and using the information that we find, to answer a specific question.

Hall uses Badu as a way of explaining her life in a “biography” format. We learned that she is more than just a singer and a dancer; she raises her children, grows herbs, helps in her old neighborhood in Dallas and continues to work on her album. It surprised me to see that Hall didn’t have to have such a specific question on Erykah Badu. With or without a specific question, the essay was well thought out and organized in a way that made it easy for the reader to understand. When I think about giving an interview I fail to think that talking to the interviewee more than once would be a good idea. With this essay in mind, it was a good idea for Hall to interview Badu for a long period of time. He was able to figure out what Badu was all about, not just simple background information that anyone could Google. Instead, he was able to find a deeper meaning in every single movement that Badu made throughout the interview.

“I had already learned something that morning about waiting for Badu. She had been in her home studio until five in the morning, so we had started our interview almost two hours late.”

As the interview continued, Hall’s idea of Badu being more than an artist was explained well with a visual of what Badu had lying around during the interview.

“A box of art supplies sat on a cluttered table next to a couple of palettes of dried orange and purple paint; on the wall were paintings of and by mom and her other child, nine-year-old son Seven. A piano and guitar sat next to the fireplace, and a hundred stalactites of colored candle wax descended from the mantel”

This detailed explanation of what lay around throughout the interview was a way in which Ballinger defined as “Reading” the visual. This visual gives us a language to talk about what we see, not just creating assumptions of what we see. But what continues to confuse me is how we are supposed to bring “reading” the visual into a paper like this.

Hall used the quotes from his interview in an interesting way. He was able to manipulate the paragraphs in his essay to fit with the things that Badu responded to. For example, Badu talked about the Maze that was painted on the floor of her house and the meaning behind it. The maze on the floor of her house was to symbolize a nourishing environment and a place “that I could retreat to when things got too busy for me” In the next paragraph, Hall wrote about Badu and her daughter sitting together as she did her daughters hair while she sucked on a bottle. This visual made it seem like it was a response to the paragraph prior to it, Badu talking about having a nourishing environment.

I continue to think about this essay and the idea behind it and after reading this essay/interview, it’s easier to understand what is required of this paper.