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Victoria Houghton
Mr. Frank
English 1030-19
January 22, 2015
Authors in the real world
Can you really define authorship as just writings or readings created by people? Videos
are not typically items that appear as authorship. I chose a video that hits home for a lot of
people. In the video, little boys decide to not hit girls. It was created to persuade you to not hit
girls and uses rhetoric to boost. The video shows that young people have good morals in todays
society. The author in the video asks the boys a series of questions to find out about their
personalities before they start to direct the conversation. The producer is using the boys to create
a story; they gave background information before leading up to the climax. Authors use this same
format when they share their works. The video is a different type of authoring by being visual
and not just written words on paper or a screen. The creators of the piece use different things for
rhetoric like the setting, music, and different tones that make the audience understand the
meaning of the video. The video represents authorship by using the same type of format, has
rhetoric to help get the point of the piece across, and is not a usual type of authorship because it
is a video.
The video picked is a form of authorship that has a specific purpose and format it
follows. Authors are individuals who can compose something with a plan or idea and make a
work of art. The video is a creation that a producer has made with a specific purpose behind it.
Giving background information is very important when trying to make a point; it is a good
starting place when trying to argue an idea. Authors that can hold an audience's attention and can

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get the purpose of the piece across to the viewers are considered good. Authorship is simply
when someone makes a creative piece that they share with the world. Some written or recorded
works are not good sources of information for being a part of the authorship crowd, but everyone
is an author. Authors are just people who stand out and have something to say that other people
will listen too.
Since the artifact is not a paper and is a video, it is not something some people would
consider to be normal authorship. Normal authorship is usually considered to be a paper, or a
book someone has written and published. Even though there are spoken words in the video, they
are not written, which throws the authorship crowd off. The video follows the guidelines that it
needs to be considered authorship, since it is a published piece of work. Someone had to have
come up with the questions and figure out the direction of the piece. At some point the makeup
of the video would have had to be written down in paper form. Just because the paper form was
transferred to a more modern video form, does not imply that it is not an authorship. The video
was created through the process of authorship, since the author had to come up with a plot line.
Since the video uses different artistic and rhetorical values along with creating a plot, it is
considered as an authorship piece.
The video uses rhetoric all through the work. In the piece, the authors want to get across
the idea that hitting girls is wrong. They demonstrate this by asking young boys specific
questions about themselves and a female. When the boys are asked to hit the girl they say no. A
few of them contemplate the idea, but none of them even attempt to hit the girl. Most of them
look at the interviewer first to ask for consent, but decide to not hit the girl. Because of this it is
the boys who have chosen to not hit a girl, showing a moral understanding that abuse is wrong.
The boys tell the interviewer that it is wrong to hit girls along with a few other reasons for why

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they do not want to hit the girl. Through this the author is conveying that it is wrong to hit girls,
because the boys know better than to hit them.
The video also demonstrates that todays youth has a specific moral to follow. The author
builds up the ideas by starting off by asking simple questions and getting some background
information, How old are you... What do you want to be when you grow upWhy (Tumblr
video). When the girl enters the scene the boys are asked to do a few things, like caress her, make
a funny face, and say what they like about her. One of the boys says Everything, while another
says, Just her hair, I swear, when the boys are asked what they like about the female (Tumblr
video). The last thing the boys are asked to do is to slap the girl. You see the boys want to obey,
but they hold back. The author uses a forceful tone and demands that the boys slap the girl. The
young males pause and look up at the interviewer, questioning the command. It could be possible
that they were looking at the adult for permission to slap the girl. The forceful tone makes the
interviewer seem more authoritative and could account for this reaction. The author uses a delay
of time to make an emphasis for the moment, before asking if the boys will not slap her. The
producer uses logic by asking the boys why they will not hit a girl, to demonstrate that hitting is
not perceived as a good thing in their eyes. The background gives the appearance that the boys
were chosen randomly to answer the questions, making the video more official. The ages of the
boys are all in the same range, so that the audience can see that they all have the same general
thoughts about not hitting girls. The author used rhetoric in the sense of the art and practice of
persuasion (Lungsford 5). The rhetoric used in the video was able to get the idea across and
show that hitting girls is not good.
Authorship is the occupation of someone creating a piece of work, such as a book or
paper. Authorship comes in many different forms and can be expressed in different ways, such as

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a video. The artist of the video uses their skills to make a work that grabs peoples attention and
makes them rethink or confirm their previous conclusions. The video makes the statement that
hitting girls is bad and not a moral thing in the young boys minds. As the boys explain their
view on hitting girls, the audience is supposed to pick up that it is not a good thing to hit females.
The piece persuades people to do the same when they ask the boys why they will not hit the girl.
The authors appeal to the ethical virtue of todays society. By using rhetoric the objective is
made clear without ever having to say that hitting girls is bad, because the boys do it on their
own from their own point of views. So, just because a piece of work is not considered to be a
normal authorship piece does not mean that it is not following the guidelines set for authors. The
video used is a form of authorship and uses rhetoric productively to get a set message across to
viewers.

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Works Cited

Lunsford, Andrea A. "Chapter 1-2." Everyone's an Author. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. 5-23.
Print.
Tumblr. YouMedia, n.d. Web. 20 Jan. 2015.
<https://www.tumblr.com/video/mysecretpersona/108312798126/500/>.