Rhetorical Analysis Of Watching Tv Makes You Smarter

The rhetorical situation within the paper is Johnson making the argument to generally educated readers that television shows are not as mindless or unintelligent as many believe. In “Watching TV Makes You Smarter,” Johnson argues that certain television shows can make a person smarter. Using the Sleeper Curve, he expresses that TV shows have progressed from being something mindless that is turned on in order to escape the reality of the rest of the world to something far more meaningful and intrinsic in its value. Although most would believe that watching television has no educational purpose, he argues that it does. Due to the evolution of most television shows, viewers must focus or pay attention to details in order to know what is going on in the show as a whole. …show more content…
Although these may sound like surface-level ideas, they are from it. In order to remember the reason why Person X is angry at Person Y, the viewer needs to understand the progression of their relationship as to why Situation A had such an effect on their friendship in the first place. The main argument Johnson uses is that television shows have progressed from what they were three or more decades ago into something that causes a viewer to actually think and track the complexity of a show. Basically, television shows have reached a point where it is a necessity to pay attention in order to follow along to the next episode, causing it to make a person think and develop cognitive