Monthly Archives: September 2021

Like many of us, we are waiting for the day to have at least one in-person class. I’m included as one of the many freshmen who haven’t been on campus yet, but am hopeful that it will happen one day. Since the start of the school year, I’ve had my outfit planned, how I’m going to do my hair, and what I’m going to bring all planned for just the first day of school. I wanted to look presentable for being in a new setting and meeting new people and just wanted to start off with a good impression. All of that together is a form of nonverbal communication. 

Nonverbal communication includes not just body language, hand gestures, and facial expressions but many other aspects as well. Nonverbal communication is defined as any meaning conveyed through sounds, behaviors, and artifacts other than words. Personal appearance is included and how we use our bodies and surroundings to communicate. Proxemics is how our use of space influences the ways we relate to others. Paralanguage is vocal qualities, volume inflection, rate of speech, and rhythm. These terms are just a few of the many different types of nonverbal communication, it’s labeled as continuous, meaning that messages are ongoing and open ended so it can be viewed in different ways. 

Clothing speaks a lot for a person, whether it’s if people want to dress comfortably or they’re just having an off day, you can tell how that person’s day is going. It’s just one of the ways of nonverbal communication and how it speaks for a person, without the person actually speaking.    

The title sounds odd doesn’t it? Well to me it actually has quite the meaning to it. It’s a symbol of love that I learned through my favorite band BTS. Many people don’t like them for many reasons but one is because “it’s kpop”. But through them I learned that the color purple has more to its meaning other than it’s just a color.

For me personally I tend to find symbols and meaning to many things. I love knowing the definition or knowing about something but finding more to it. Like how many people see lady bugs as good luck or how lyrics to a song can mean something but there is more to it and a story behind it. Symbolism has its 3 qualities, arbitrary, ambiguous, and abstract. Arbitrary has no direct relationship to the object. Ambiguous has several possible meanings. And abstract means they are not material or physical and only represent objects or ideas. 

Symbolism all falls under a form of verbal communication and how it is used to show meaning or how people interpret things. In this blog specifically “ I purple you” has its ambiguous symbol with the last color of the rainbow as one meaning and another saying of “I love you” that BTS uses toward ARMY, their fanbase, as another meaning. Music for sure has its own form of communication especially when it comes to songs about emotion or experiences.

One of the many struggles students face, including myself, is finding a balance between classes. Personally for me, trying to remember what the previous lesson was about confuses me more on the subject so I end up focusing too much on one class than the others. But fortunately for my classes now I am able to find a balance between most of them. Although it has only been a few weeks of classes, a similar topic that has popped up in my Philosophy, English and Communications class is ethos, pathos, and logos and rhetoric. In Philosophy we’re seeing how it’s used in paradoxes, in English we research how it’s used in articles and speeches, and in Communications we’re reading about how it’s used when we communicate with people and how we developed the definition for it.

Throughout the history of communications, rhetoric specifically has developed a different interpretation in each era with how a specific group of people define it. In the Medieval Period there would be a relationship between rhetoric and the church. The Classical period had multiple researchers like Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates. More research and discovery was found in The Renaissance period where rhetoric was used to empower women. The Enlightenment period found rhetoric in basic human nature and knowledge. 

Just like my classes and the different periods of time I’m researching on my own how rhetoric is used in different subjects. And finding new ways of how it’s used or when to use it.