So, what makes this project rhetorical? As Bitzer says, a rhetorical situation depends on the context in which it occurs. The situation in the present time is the Covid-19 pandemic, which has brought with it many conflicting opinions and controversy as to how it should be handled. To believe that this pandemic won’t be considered historical and taught to future generations is foolish.

Therefore, this story within the Sims is rhetorical in that it shows one of the situations that real people are facing and brings attention to some of the issues that aren’t being solved in the middle of the pandemic, even though so many are suffering because of it.

The Quarantini Sims family is forced to stay at home because of the grandfather’s age making him at high risk of suffering severe complications should he contract Covid-19. This limits their ability to make an income as many jobs require the employee to be on-site and not remote for working, even if as many places are trying to allow for remote work as possible. In the Sim world, this is a much more difficult task, which is something being faced by real people who are unable to find a job remotely or physically go to a job due to the high risk they may put themselves or a loved one at by being exposed to Covid-19.

This piece doesn’t offer solutions, as I’m unsure that there are clear solutions to be offered in this situation. It merely brings light to the situation that will undoubtedly be remembered in history and the struggles that it places on regular families.

For this project, I wanted to do something a little more lighthearted due to the heavy circumstances that the world is currently facing with the pandemic and growing death toll. Therefore, I recalled a fun piece of writing that detailed the life of a family created in the Sims and the author wrote out their lives with supplemental screenshots for the story. I took this idea and tailored it to be more fitting for the current times.

I created a family in the Sims 4 to keep in quarantine and see how it affects life even in a fictional setting. I tried to make a realistic situation for them and show how their lives and futures have in effect been put on hold due to circumstances they are unable to control.

The purpose of this project is not to make economic capital, but more to make cultural capital. The pandemic has shifted lives in a way that people have been shocked by a drastic change to the culture and ways of life they were used to.

Onto the content contained within the project, which will be made on a separate blog to this one and made public soon. It follows a young woman who lives with her grandfather. Due to his age, her grandfather has to be especially careful during the times of quarantine, and the young woman has to take precautions due to this higher risk factor affecting someone with whom she lives. Unfortunately, this isn’t an unusual situation for people in the real world and they are having to take risk factors into consideration that haven’t had such devastating consequences in the past.

The young woman has to put her dream of owning a bakery on hold because of social distancing rules and the risk that being in a public place could pose for her grandfather living with her. So, she is put in a situation where she needs to put her plans aside and find a way to make an income and pay her bills while also having the money to take care of their two cats and a dog. The best way for her to do this is to find some sort of income that can be made online, because the Sim government is not providing help in these financially difficult times, so she’s working on learning programming and becoming a freelance programmer until she can continue pursuing her true pastry-flavored dream.

Meanwhile, Gramps is trying to be helpful by writing his memoir that “everybody will absolutely want to read” as he’s certain that this newfangled internet will love his stories as much as his family pretends to. The blessing in his writing is that it helps him pass his time in quarantine.

Their pets, at least, help maintain a semblance of normalcy in their lives. The pets don’t know that anything is wrong in the world, but their humans are home all the time now and that makes it seem like whatever is happening is the best thing ever.

The first of my two questions is: Is there anything I can do to emphasize how the quarantine impacts families through using the Sims beyond what has already been mentioned?

The second question is: Beyond Bitzer and Bourdieu, what other sources would be good to draw from for this project? It isn’t entirely economic capital that is being gained as much as cultural capital (or so I believe).

1. Dani mentions often how boring the job is and how it can be both varying from day-to-day, but also that a lot of the work is the same and that she has templates to be used for those similar situations or repeating problems. There was a lot of representation for the company as opposed to having independence in how she deals with the customers.
2. What sort of changes in the workplace would the workers like to see? Is there a template that they don’t have, but wish they had, for any other situations? It’s impressive that Dani can keep all of her work and resources organized and that she knew how to deal with an unruly customer without issue.
3. Dani is acting as that mediator from the readings between customers and the company, being the first contact to solve issues. The attention economy has a role here in that Dani has her attention split over multiple customers, while at the same time the customers might not be paying attention to her.
4. Dealing with customers is tiring and the workplace might have nice additions for worker comfort, but the customers are something that can’t be controlled.

Research Question: What are the views you have of writing in the workplace after having gone through STEM heavy coursework in college rather than focusing on humanities?

I want to know how writing is used and viewed in a setting where the primary output of a company is material, such as in a foundry. Not only that, but I want to speak to one of the managers who I know was not a big fan of humanities subjects in his college days. I want to know how his views of writing have changed now that it’s more relevant to his career than in an academic setting, if they’ve changed at all. I would just need to observe him doing his general workplace obligations, because as a manager communication is very important to keep operations running smoothly.

Interview Protocol:

1. Have your views on writing, English, and other humanities subjects changed since you’ve been in this position?
2. How many of your daily tasks involve writing or written communication in any form?
3. Do you spend time outside of work using writing for work-related tasks?
4. If you could go back to your college days, would you change anything about the writing courses you took or try to take additional writing courses? Do you think that there would have been benefit in that?
5. Has your perception on the value of writing changed?
6. Does writing feel different because it’s for your job compared to when you had to write in an academic setting?

Recruitment Script:

I’m taking a class about writing and how it relates to economics and is used in the workplace. We’re doing a project about how different professions and careers use writing and what forms are used, and I would like permission to interview you, with an audio recorder recording the interview, and observe you at work in order to gather research for this project. Your consent to help is voluntary and you have the right to remain anonymous should you wish. None of your information gathered will go beyond the classroom and it would be purely for educational benefit.

Additional interview question to the writer: Is your writing process different when you find yourself having to write scenes or shows on a topic that is not interesting to you or that you don’t like at all?

Almost immediately, Nakamura’s piece made me think of the risk shift that was described as part of the New Economy in a previous piece. Particularly, the Gina Neff idea of “YOYO” (you’re on your own) economics. I’m not sure that there’s a more direct example of that New Economy with the risk being shifted to workers so that the corporations can relieve themselves of responsibility. It’s become a practice of “how can I make the most profit with the least amount of risk and cost to myself?”

Then, that leads to the issues of workers being exploited for low pay and poor conditions. I think the digital economy has evolved quicker than regulations on it can be developed. But at the same time, how can you regulate the conditions of work done by distance workers or work that can be done in any location that allows an internet connection? Where do we even start in making the situation for workers who are being exploited in the digital economy better?

Working from home in the digital economy is a beast of its own as well. Yes, it allows people more comfort, but I know people who ended up constantly working longer hours than they would have in an office setting because they were given large projects with deadlines that didn’t allow for enough time to finish the project within what would be normal working hours.

1. Questions that came up for me mostly revolved around how writing is used in companies that don’t necessarily rely on writing for their operations. Particularly, I’m looking to interview a manager  to see how he uses writing in his job, even though the output of the company is a material good that isn’t very related to writing. However, I suspect that there is a lot of writing done at each level of the company in order to keep operations running smoothly and efficiently. How is the writing different from the time that they were a student in college or high school? If you didn’t like writing while in an academic setting, are your feelings about the same in the workplace setting? Does having a STEM background influence your writing in your workplace? If so, is it a positive or negative influence?
2. How is it different to write in the workplace compared to writing as a student in an academic setting?
3. I think that interviews and observations will be the most beneficial methods for me. They are more personal and I can see the feeling and operations behind the writing that the person does. If I’m analyzing just the writing they’ve produced, it doesn’t tell me as much about the writing as it does about the audience to whom they’re writing. If I want to know about writing the the interviewee’s life and their feelings towards it since it wasn’t a field they necessarily wanted to go in to, then I need to know more about their day, methods, and feelings than about the writing they output during that time.

There are a lot of jobs that I could see myself pursuing or wanting post-graduation, and most of them involve writing of some kind, as most jobs as starting to or already involve a good deal of writing in some manner to keep everything functioning properly and communication flowing. Ideally, I would like to work in the education field, whether I end up as an educator or in the administration somewhere. Both of those roles require a great deal of writing to communicate with other educators, administrators, students, depending on the grade level that may include communicating with the parents or guardians of students. I would also have to write lesson plans and assignments, then write feedback for assignments. I’ll have to write emails for sure. I would have to deal with multiple audiences depending on with whom I’m communicating and would have to adjust my writing based on that.

I think that I would be happy in most positions that require writing because it’s something I genuinely enjoy doing in pretty much any form.

It’s interesting to read about how versatile writing as a skill can be in the world of business, especially considering that English as a degree is often given a bad reputation as being something that’s useless and a waste of money. Yet despite that reputation, the skills that an English degree teaches are very valuable to the working world, and I suspect that will continue to be the case even as technology evolves and becomes more advanced.

Even when jobs are in jeopardy, the people studied were able to shift into other jobs that involve writing. It may have been writing that differed from what they were used to, but they were still able to adapt and do their new jobs. It definitely makes me wonder if this will always be the case, that writing provides a versatility and ability to move from job to job that can’t fully be taken away by the development of technology. How could technology be designed in a way that can fulfill all the writing positions of a human? Would it be able to be designed in a way that allowed it to get across the emotional aspects when writing required it?

This reading makes me think a lot about the place of writing in the future for jobs and how a degree that helps with writing could become more valuable than people like to give it credit for.

For Project One I analyzed Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing.” He chose voting Americans as his audience and his exigence was the progressive agenda of President Johnson. He saw those progressive principles as a threat, and he used emotional appeals and appeals to the patriotism of his audience to persuade them into seeing those progressive principles as being dangerous as well. The constraint was that he would not be able to reach every voting-aged American with his speech or his ideals, instead he needed to focus on the ones whose views were more in the middle and able to be shifted if he gave them the right nudges to believe that progressive ideas would be harmful to them.

I decided to do this project in the form of a speech transcript like the one I used of Reagan’s speech to analyze. At first I had wanted to do it in the form of a children’s book, but I felt like there was a lot more depth and analysis that needed to be done with Reagan’s speech than a children’s book would allow. The other reason I chose to do it in the form of a speech transcript is that it’s relevant to politics today. We really are at a time for choosing once again with the progressive agenda of Bernie Sanders, presidential candidate, on the rise while other politicians try to do the same thing that Reagan did in 1964: demonize and create fear around the effects of progressive policies.

My goal was to both look at how Reagan used his speech to manipulate his audience, but also the effects it had overtime as he became an economic idol to some political groups. In addition, I wanted to point out how the policies he pushed for in his speech would harm the average person in the idea of Hacker’s New Economy where the risk is taken from the employers and placed upon the employees. If there is no force keeping corporations regulated, they are going to minimize their own risks and maximize their profit at the expense of everyone else.