Killingsworth Rhetorical Analysis

Improved Essays
According to Ted Talks online video, “Want to be happier? Stay in the moment,” guest speaker, Matt Killingsworth, begins by saying that the reason we desire extravagant objects is to achieve happiness. He continues to explain that happiness is the outcome of living in the moment. Next, Killingsworth explains that people are much happier when they are focused rather than when they are mind wandering. He goes on to further describe the relationship between mind wandering and unhappiness; and clarifies that mind wandering is a source, and not a product of unhappiness. Killingsworth concludes that by researching the moment-to-moment happiness of peoples lives, this will support us in leading a future that is much happier and content. (Ted.com).

Related Documents

  • Decent Essays

    In an excerpt from his book, Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town (2005), Dale Maharidge utilizes numerous rhetorical appeals including ethos, pathos, mythos, and kairos to persuade the reader that the survival of small towns in Iowa depend on their capacity to accept immigrants. This book covers the history of a small town in western Iowa, Denison, and its unflattering historic past of hostility towards immigrants. He begins the book by…

    • 80 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Bailee: Good Morning Mrs. Lott, How are you? Sis. Lott: I’m pretty good, Bailee. Come in.…

    • 213 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    To demonstrate, critic David Vanderwerken acknowledges that the most powerful of these inversions is the reversal of the relationship between father and son. According to Vanderwerken, the father will help the son make the transition from “dependence to independence” but in Night the “...roles are completely reversed; the son becomes the parent” (Vanderwerken 64). This transposal becomes extremely apparent upon Wiesel and his father’s arrival at Buchenwald. It is there that his father, already frail, completely breaks down; he speaks feverishly of things that never happened and relies more and more heavily on his son as a provider. An example of this would be when Wiesel discovers his father in his bed, crying that his neighbors were beating…

    • 277 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Hello, Malik Swafford! Thank you for showing us your essay!! Your title is pretty simple but it’s nice! I can sure your first sentence and second sentence are very attractive!…

    • 136 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Kingsolver is correct about America’s degrading basic survival competencies but comes off as a pretentious wide eyed idealist which leaves the reader reluctant to admit that she is right. Why? The argument presented by the text is compelling with examples of children who associated the dirt of growing food with something that is unsanitary or unsafe to consume. She further alludes to what we now call the “Purell Generation”, people so afraid of bacteria and germs they neglect or ignore the fact there are beneficial qualities to some of those elements.…

    • 340 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    English Diagnostic Essay Adam B. Summers wrote a persuasive editorial, “Bag Ban Bad for freedom and Environment,” using many persuasive details to make his argument. Summers is able to appeal and relate to his audience. The different tactics that Summers uses is rallying pronouns, hard, cold facts, and extensive support and diction. The author writes about how banning plastic bags is hurtful to the world and economy in many ways. With deliberate thought, Summers chooses words like “us” or “our”, in the first paragraph.…

    • 672 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    James Hamblin utilizes ethos, logos, and pathos to effectively argue that experience rather than material possessions brings true happiness. He begins by providing statistics pertaining a wondering mind and the negative effects it can have on our mental status. According to psychologist Matthew Killingsworth “it is not good for [ones’] well-being to have a wandering mind” (Hamblin, James, 2014, para. 1). Daniel Gilbert claims “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind”…

    • 968 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    There are many ways that people in positions of power influence society. Whether it’s someone who is a preacher like Jonathan Edwards that influence the behavior of their congregation, or sSomeone like Patrick Henry who used his position of wealth in Virginia to preach the idea of liberty from Britain in Colonial America. They all seem to have one thing in common, they all use rhetoric in some shape or form in their orations to their audiences. How Jonathan Edwards used rhetoric used was he heavily relied on pathos to influence the people in his church to stop sinning and start repenting. He said things like “You hang by a slender thread with flames of divine wrath flashing about it and ready every moment to burn it asunder.”…

    • 440 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    I agree to Willingham’s argument and think that it will complement the reading comprehension strategies. I can relate my science students to baseball example given in the video, where some of my top scorer on science assignments are not the one who passing English classes with good grades. I assign science reading to my students almost every class and they would often complaint, it is too difficult to comprehend. I feel in science class, failure might not be the sufficient reading ability to understand more familiar genres of text, but rather, the student may only falter when faced with challenging, knowledge demanding text.…

    • 272 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Jonathan Edwards expresses throughout his entire sermon one common ideal. Being born again is the only way to salvation. Articulating many puritan ideals about Gods vision of humans, he claims humans are instinctive sinners and we must change to escape the jaws of hell. Believing in predestination he emphasizes on this matter. But its central argument is not the most important aspect of this sermon.…

    • 497 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Rhetorical Analysis

    • 1211 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Go into paragraph and talk about how before white males were in power blah blah and how Lincoln wanted to abolish south leaders altogether and how at first American society was not really a democracy at all and how this info in the whole paragraph is America moving one step closer to democracy. In McPherson’s book, he refers to the economic environment of the South as being a slave reliant one in which it greatly depended on its predominantly agriculture and plantation systems, while the North focused more on equality and the rights of the people. African Americans began demonstrating political resistance and acting out against their white slave owners during the Civil War. When Lincoln came into office, the Freedmen’s Bureau surfaced which…

    • 1211 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    According to Haidt, people will never be content with what they have at any given point and time in their lives, which he calls “the progress principle”. It describes how people work each day in hopes of eventually achieving something great, but when they finally succeed the sense of happiness they experience is fleeting “then we succeed, and if we’re lucky we get an hour, maybe a day, or euphoria. . .my first thought is seldom ‘Hooray! Fantastic!’ It is ‘Okay, what do I have to do now?”…

    • 1193 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A Rhetorical Analysis

    • 631 Words
    • 3 Pages

    President, I commend you on these matters, and I am not asking for retribution on this matter. I am asking for further, and harsher enforcement on these matters. Don’t be afraid to get tougher, the statistics show it can only get better from here. Should it not boggle the mind that citizens in the USA want rights for someone who we know nothing about, and could possibly hut us. Imagine the Kate Stinley case happening to hundreds of children nationwide.…

    • 631 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “A man who has given away a small fortune, forsaken a loving family, abandoned his car, watch, and map, and burned the last of his money before traipsing off into the wilderness” (71). The national best selling book, “Into the Wild” written by Jon Krakauer tells the story about a man name Chris McCandless. The story takes place in 1990’s and tells the adventures of the a man who changes his name to Alex Supertramp. The story tells the readers of the book:all the different people he met on his journey, where he want and how he died. As the author writees about Chris’s life and his connections with the story he includes many different types of writting styles including rhetoricstragides.…

    • 1046 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    He questions the true existence and influence of humanly happiness and satisfaction found in the pleasure of materials. Discussing happiness to play on emotions he inquires his audience: “The question is: with so much effort dedicated to giving us what we want, why aren’t we happier or, at the very least, worrying less and enjoying life more?...” [McKevitt 144]. While the author certainly has the reader paying attention with compelling writing, he solely attacked this argument with emotions of anger and frustration. There was no fact-based evidence to back up his last argument and he didn’t offer any solutions to the problem he so strongly believes we have and must deal with…

    • 1190 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays