In my ePortfolio, every design decision that I made had a purpose. The colors, the pictures, the fonts are all there for a specific reason. First let’s start with the colors. The main two colors of my site are white and then black is in there a little bit. I chose these two colors because most of the pictures that I used are brightly colored and on the white or black background it makes those colors pop and stick out more. I chose the colors of the pictures because most of them are brightly colored and this website was about me and the work that I had done throughout this year. I feel like these brightly colored pictures reflect my personality because I am a very happy person most of the time and these pictures and colors are meant to make the person viewing my website feel warm and welcome. I also feel that my personality comes off in my writing, most of my writing and other compositions (to me at least) seem creative and fun. None of them are really completely serious and boring. Next, I chose the pictures that I did because most of them involve the ocean or water in some way, and I feel like that was a big theme of my writing this year. Two out of my three projects were about the surf culture in Hawaii and how it has evolved. The other pictures that do not involve water or the ocean have something to do with the topic of the project or paper that they are around. For example, the picture that I used for my composition outside of this class was a picture from The Lion King with the words Hakuna Matata because that paper that I wrote was about The Lion King and how it relates to stories in the Bible. I also chose this picture because it says Hakuna Matata, which means no worries for the rest of your days, it’s my problem free philosophy. Another example of this is, the two pictures in my project one category are of the Jacksonville Jaguars stadium and mascot. I chose these pictures because I am from Jacksonville and am a huge Jags fan, this first project is also about football and the rhetorical genres used within the sport, so I had to throw in some stuff about my Jags (DUUUVAL)!

            The Lion King is an animated Disney movie that came out in 1994. It is a story of a young lion prince, Simba, whose father, Mufasa, is murdered by his brother, Scar. Scar kills Mufasa because he wanted to become the king over all of the animals and felt that he deserved this title. Simba is forced into exile after Scar takes over and must grow up in the wild away from his friends and family. This classic movie can be compared to a couple different Old Testament Biblical Texts. The creators of The Lion King, “Irene Mecchi, Jonathan Roberts, and Linda Woolverton, took inspiration… from classic sources, including the biblical tales of Joseph and Moses” (Perrotta 2015).  In this essay I will compare how the classic Disney movie relates to these biblical stories.

            Genesis 37-50 tells the story of Jacob’s son Joseph. In this story, Joseph is his father’s pride and joy. Genesis 37:3 says “Now Israel (Jacob) loved Joseph more than any other of his children” (Genesis 37:3) and this angered Joseph’s brothers to the point that they are willing to sell him into slavery. The brothers sell Joseph to some traders and tell Jacob that his favorite son was mauled by a wild animal. They even go to the extent of smearing goats’ blood on Joseph’s coat to convince their father of his death (Genesis 37:25-34). Like Joseph, Simba is also the thing that his father loves most in the world. While Simba has no siblings, it is his uncle who becomes jealous that Simba will soon be on the throne. Because of his jealousy and lust of the throne, Scar decides to kill Mufasa and then sent three hyenas to kill Simba. This causes Simba, like Joseph, to leave his home and go into exile while most people believe he is dead. After becoming enslaved in Egypt, Joseph is thrown in prison and eventually called to Pharaoh to decipher one of his dreams. Pharaoh’s dream tells of a famine in all of the land is coming in the next few years and this gives them time to prepare (Genesis 41: 36). Pharaoh’s dream is like in The Lion King when, after Scar takes the throne, the entire land becomes desolated and all the plants die. After Joseph interoperates Pharaoh’s dream, he is then named Pharaoh’s right-hand man and quickly gains a lot of power. It is then that his family comes to Egypt to try and escape the famine and Joseph is able to forgive his brothers and give them all land and food so they can survive (Genesis 46:28-34).  Like Joseph, once Simba is old enough, he is able to take back his throne and restore the land to peace and prosperity while also being able to forgive Scar just as Joseph forgave his brothers.

            The Lion King also relates to one other Old Testament story, the story of Moses. Exodus 2-20 tells the story of Moses. In his story, the Pharaoh declares “Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live” (Exodus 1:22).  When Moses is born his mother puts him in a basket and put him in a river. His basket floated down the river to where the daughter of Pharaoh was bathing. She saw this basket and decided that she was going to raise the child as her own. Once Moses grows up, he is given a respectable position of royalty among the Egyptians (Exodus 2:3-10) In the beginning of his life, like Moses, Simba is being sought after to be killed by Scar’s hyenas. Once he escapes the hyenas, Simba finds Timon and Pumbaa, a meerkat and a warthog respectively, who basically raise him and invoke their way of life on him, as the Pharaoh’s daughter does to Moses. Simba then finds a peaceful place to settle down and live with his new adopted family before Mufasa speaks to him through the stars and tells him he needs to go back and take his people back. This is almost the exact same as the story of Moses. Once exiled from Egypt, Moses finds a wife and settles down with his new family until God appears to Moses through the burning bush and tells him that he needs to go back to Egypt and free the Israelites (Exodus 3:1-10.)

            Before doing research on this topic I was unaware that there were so many movies where biblical themes could be seen throughout them. My appreciation for The Lion King has definitely increased after doing research for this project and learning that they intentionally created the film with the same themes as the stories of Joseph and Moses in the Old Testament. While The Lion King has different things in common with both of these biblical stories I think that there is one common theme between both of them, “When destiny calls, all three characters answer” (Zaltzman 2019). Simba fights to reclaim his throne, take back his father’s kingdom from his evil uncle Scar, and bring the land back to peace and prosperity. Joseph rises to power in Egypt, saves all of the land from a deadly famine, and not only has mercy on his brothers, but gives them many gifts of land, food, and livestock. Lastly, Moses after being exiled from his home, listens to God’s call for his life and goes back to Egypt to save his people. Moses then helps them escape the slavery that they were in, parts the Red Sea, and leads them through the dessert and to the promised land. I think that the film did a good job interpreting these two stories in the bible for being an animated Disney movie. The only differences that I saw between the stories was that the Lion King was about cartoon talking animals whereas the stories in the Old Testament happened thousands of years ago.

I had to write this composition for my Introduction to the Old Testament class. The assignment said that we had to pick a movie and explain how it related to a story in The Old Testament. The professor gave us some movies that we could use and most of them were animated movies about a story Old Testament. The professor said that we had to email him if we wanted to use any other movies other than the ones on the list. I thought that this project could be really cool and interesting if I thought outside the box and used a movie that no one else would think of. I did some research (I was watching Disney plus) and I realized that I could compare The Lion King to the stories of Joseph and the coat of many colors and Moses and the ten plagues. I then had to email my professor and try and convince him to let me use this movie. The official definition of rhetoric is the art of persuasive speaking or writing, so this email is where the rhetoric really begins. The email was my genre, I was the rhetor, and my professor was my audience. I used Logos to try to convince him by briefly describing to him how the movie related to these stories. He did end up saying yes and said he thought it was a great idea. So, in writing the paper I used many different rhetorical devises. Once again, I was the rhetor and my professor was the audience. The paper was the genre and I used logos to explain how the movie was related and connected to the stories in the Old Testament. The exigence of this paper was to affectively show my professor that there are in fact connections between The Lion King and the stories of Joseph and Moses in the Bible. The paper did have one constraint though; It was comparing an animated Disney movie from 1994, to true events that happened thousands of years ago.

For my Multi-genre Campaign, my goal is to spread awareness, mainly to surfers, about the history of Hawaiian surf culture. I chose to do this because this is where surfing began and understanding how this surf culture has evolved and spread into what we know it to be today is vital in order to grasp the concept that surfing is more than a sport; it’s a lifestyle. For my first genre, I wrote a blog. This blog gives a brief summary and highlights what I felt were the most important historical details that allowed the surf culture in Hawaii to evolve. For this blog I basically summarized the three important topics that I talked about in my research paper. The first topic was Captain James Cook and his first encounter with the native Hawaiians and surfing, the second was the protestant missionaries that attempted to “reform” the native Hawaiians and get rid of surfing, the final topic was the Waikiki beach boys and the modernization of surfing.  At the end of each of the important historical topics, I included a link to a website where the reader can go to get more information about each specific topic. Honestly, I think this is the least effective of my genres. I think that a blog on a free website is hard to find and I think that if people find the blog they then realize that it is just a blog written by a college freshman who has no real expertise in this subject, so they might not read it, or take it as seriously as they should. My second genre is an Instagram page. This Instagram page’s handle is @savethesurfculture and every couple of days I will post a fact that has to do with the surf culture in Hawaii or the history of the Hawaiian surf culture to briefly educate the followers of the Instagram page. Each picture posted will use the hashtag #savethesurfculture and other popular surf related hashtags to catch the attention of people looking at surf videos. The Instagram page will also have the link to the blog in the bio so that if people are interested and want more information, they can click the link and read the blog. I think that this genre is effective among younger surfers who are on Instagram. This genre will be easier to read and understand because it will be shorter and more to the point than the blog. The posts will be meant to catch the attention of someone scrolling through their Instagram feed, so they will be colorful, and most will probably surf pictures or videos. I also have followed a lot of famous surfers and surf accounts in hopes that this Instagram page will start popping up in peoples recommended for who to follow because we follow similar accounts. My third genre is stickers. Each sticker is oval shaped with a white background and a green border. In the middle of the sticker it will say Save The Surf Culture in big letters and above that it will have the link to the blog in smaller letters and at the bottom will have the Instagram handle in smaller letters as well. These stickers will be placed everywhere around Jacksonville and hopefully eventually will spread to other surf towns around the world. The idea behind this is that people will see these stickers on cars, stop signs, surfboards, anywhere and everywhere, and will be curious about what the sticker means and will look up the link, find the Instagram page, or just google save the surf culture and find more information about the evolution of the surf culture in Hawaii. This is probably my favorite composition because I think that stickers are kind of a part of the surf culture in Jacksonville. Almost every surfer you see has stickers on their boards and there are stickers on almost all the stop signs in Jacksonville, Beach. Most of the local restaurants in Jacksonville have stickers and everyone knows what they mean. For example, Angie’s Sub Shop has stickers that look like the ones I designed that say ASS, and everyone knows that they are for Angie’s, I even have one on my car. There is also another restaurant, TacoLu, that has stickers that look similar to the ones I designed that say Lu and others that say LUval, because we live in Duval county. So, I think that this genre will gain a lot of attention as more and more stickers are planted throughout the beach town.

In 1778 Captain James Cook, a British explorer, landed on the beaches of Hawaii. He was the first nonnative to experience surfing. This was his third expedition to the Pacific, and he had seen other natives canoeing and body surfing, but never standing on their boards as the Hawaiians did. This amazed Cook and he wrote many detailed descriptions of the Hawaiians surfing and called them “ocean experts.” Cook came back to the islands a year later and relied heavily on the Hawaiian Islands materials to repair his ships and stock up on supplies before their journey back to Britain. When the explorer left the islands this time, he was caught in a storm that damaged his mast and was forced to turn back. He landed on the beaches of Kealakekua Bay to repair the mast. While they were there multiple tools on their ship went missing and so Cook’s response to a couple lost tools was to take nine other men and go to shore. In an attempt to take the Hawaiian chief, Kalani`opu`u, hostage, the Hawaiians fought back killing Cook and four of his men.

In the nineteenth century, protestant missionaries came to the Hawaiian Islands in an attempt to reform the natives. Because the Hawaiian’s culture was different from the missionaries, they thought that it was wrong and needed to be corrected. Surfing was condemned by the missionaries and said to be one of the islands existing evils. The missionaries thought that the natives needed to wear more clothes, work more, and play less. Most of the missionaries disliked surfing because when the surf was firing, the Hawaiians would naturally flock to it and stay out all day. By the time they got back in it was too dark to work in the fields and the missionaries thought that they had wasted an entire day. The missionaries tried to do anything they could to get rid of surfing. They started publishing their own newspapers around the islands, all with the same theme, calling surfers lazy and indifferent. The articles said surfing was wrong, and this almost killed the sport. Hawaiians suffered at the hands of the protestant missionaries, their culture was displaced, and their sovereignty was threatened. Few dared to surf again until the 1890s. Princess Kaiulani defiantly took up surfing as an act of rebellion, nonviolent, joyful, and a breath of life to her people. Because of the princess surfing was reborn and soon became Hawaii’s great gift to the world.

Following Princess Kaiulani’s rebellion, surfing gained momentum and became the popular sport in Hawaii once again. With this rise in popularity came beach boys, dedicated surfers who made their living shaping boards, lifeguarding, or teaching the art of surfing. In the early 1900s, George Freeth and Duke Kahanamoku became the first professional surfers. While Duke Kahanamoku is also known for being an Olympic swimmer, he is most famously known for introducing surfing to Australia. As the story goes, in 1914 Kahanamoku was in Australia for a national swimming tour, when on Christmas eve, the waves were firing and like the native Hawaiians in the nineteenth century, he couldn’t resist the surf. He paddled out at Freshwater Beach and caught a couple of waves and the people watching from the beach fell in love with the sport. Ten years later in 1924, American waterman and inventor, Tom Blake, visited the Hawaiian Islands and immediately fell in love with the people and their culture. Blake became good friends with Duke Kahanamoku and for many years they worked together to try and improve surfing. In 1935, Blake attached the keel of a boat to the bottom of the tail of his board and found that it gave him way more control and made it significantly easier to surf. By this time, Princess Kaiulani and the Waikiki beach boys had laid the foundation for modern surf culture.

For more information on these topics and more about the history of Hawaiian surf culture you can follow these links!

In this second project it was easy to tell how much of an improvement I made in my writing since the first project. There were far less errors and most of them were just stupid mistakes because I did not proofread well enough. In my first paragraph I had to change has to have because the rest of the sentence was in past tense and because I didn’t proofread, I used has. The next thing that I tried to correct, emphasis on the tried, was I had a quote that was five lines long, so I attempted to block said quote. In order to do so you essentially start a new paragraph with each line indented. WordPress won’t let you indent in your paragraphs so; the first line of the quote is indented but the rest is not. It just looks like I started a new paragraph. I also forgot to put the page number of a quote in my intext citation, so I added that. I fixed a comma splice in my last body paragraph, and surprisingly that was my only one this paper. I had to correct a lot of them in my first paper so big improvement! The last correction that I made was I forgot to fix a dropped quote that I knew I had in my rough draft, so I just added a colon between the last sentence and the quote.

            I have lived in Jacksonville, Florida for almost my entire life and have grown up at the beach and in the ocean. My grandparents live oceanfront and my uncle is one of the best surfers in Jax Beach, so surfing has been a center of my life for as long as I can remember. For this paper, I chose to research the surf culture in Hawaii because I am very familiar with the surf culture in Jacksonville, but I wanted to see how it was different from the surf culture of the place where surfing first began. I think that I am so interested in the Hawaiian surf culture because “Hawaii functions as modern surfing’s origin story, providing a geographical anchor and site of pilgrimage” (Gibson, Margaret, and Mardi Frost), so learning more about it would give me more insight into my own surf culture back in Jacksonville. To begin my research, I asked the question: How has surfing changed in Hawaii and what events led the sport to change so drastically? Through my research, I have found that there are three main events that have allowed the surf culture in Hawaii to change so drastically. The first was in 1778 when Captain James Cook, an English explorer, observed the Hawaiians surfing, he was the first non-Hawaiian to see the beginnings of the prominent culture that we know today. The second was the arrival of the Protestant Missionaries in Hawaii who tried to “reform” the native Hawaiian’s lives and caused the sport of surfing and its culture to almost go extinct. The third is the natural evolution of the “modern” surf culture of Hawaii, filled with some of the most famous surfers in the world including John John Florence, Jamie O’Brien, Tamayo Perry, and Laird Hamilton, along with the modern day inventions that have shaped the style of surfing for all surfers in the competition era around the world. While it is important to acknowledge what westerners did to get their own surf culture, it is even more important to know how and where that surf culture began. It is vital to all surf culture to remember and celebrate the native Hawaiian culture and how it has evolved into what we know it to be today.

            In 1778 Captain James Cook, a British navigator, sailed to Hawaii on his third voyage to the Pacific. When he arrived, he was treated like a god by the native Hawaiians, so in return for their hospitality he gave them three goats, two English pigs, and melon, pumpkin, and onion seeds for them to plant (Schmitt, Robert). In Captain Cook’s logs of his voyages, there are many “descriptions of the abilities of Islanders in water-based activities as diverse as swimming, diving, canoeing, surfing and sailing” (The Surfing Tommy Tanna), Cook also “acknowledged Hawaiians as masters over their aquatic domain and have revered them as ocean experts” (Walker, Isaiah Helekunihi). He wrote of the Hawaiians standing up on their boards when they surfed, something he had never seen before. In his other voyages to the Pacific Islands he had seen other native peoples canoeing and body surfing but never standing on their boards like the Hawaiians did. The Hawaiians also had boards like none of the other native peoples. Their boards were made out of koa or wiliwili wood and went through a very precise and sacred process when shaped. The Hawaiians would start with one of these particularly buoyant types of wood and then shape them with a stone adz. They would then use coral to sand the wood and make it smooth. Finally, they would use the root of a ti plant or the bark of kukui tree to give the boards a durable, glossy, water resistant finish (Schmitt, Robert). The Hawaiians rode two different types of boards, the Olo and the Alaia. The Olo board was usually made out of wiliwili wood, thicker in the middle and thinned out toward the edges. This board was extremely long, sometimes up to fifteen feet long, and was perfect for riding smaller waves, like a modern day long board, it was usually only ridden by the upper class or royalty in Hawaii because it was able to be ridden for much longer on each wave. The Alaia board was shorter and more maneuverable than the olo boards, so this made it better for larger, steeper, faster breaking waves, like a modern-day short board.

Though captain Cook was the first non-Hawaiian to document and observe the Hawaiians surfing, Hawaii was “home to skilled waterman who… mastered the surfing arts well before the arrival of captain Cook in 1778” (McCoy). Later that same year Cook returned to the islands again, and again he was treated like a god and presented with gifts. While he was there, he relied heavily on the Hawaiians and more specifically, the resources their islands had to offer. Tensions between Cook’s crew members and the Hawaiian natives grew, so the foreign explorers decided to leave the islands on February 4, 1779. Cook and his crew were caught in a storm on their way back to Britain that damaged their mast and they were forced to turn back to the Hawaiian Islands. They landed the ship at Kealakekua Bay to repair the damaged mast. While they were repairing the mast, the armorer’s tongs and a cutter went missing, so on February 14 Cook took nine other marines and went ashore, in an attempt to take Kalani`opu`u, the Hawaiian chief, hostage. The Hawaiians did not like this and fought back, killing four of the marines and Cook as well (Schmitt, Robert).

            Another important factor in the evolution of surfing and surf culture in Hawaii was the Protestant missionaries that tried to reform the Hawaiians in the nineteenth century. The Hawaiian natives’ culture was different from theirs, so they thought that it was wrong. Surfing was “long condemned by the missionaries as one of the Islands’ existing evils” (Moser, Patrick). The missionaries “principal objection, it seems, was to the locals’ preference for surfing in the nude” (Lancaster, John), they thought that the Hawaiians needed to wear more clothes, work more, and play less. Most of the missionaries thought that surfing was bad because when the surf was firing all of the local Hawaiians would “flock here to surf. They [would] stay until the time for gardening had passed” (Moser, Patrick). The missionaries published anti-surfing articles in missionary run newspapers that were published throughout the islands. Most of these articles had the same themes, calling surfers “lazy” and “indifferent.” One article posed the question “is it not possible to quit surfing?” And another simply stated, “surfing is wrong” (Moser, Patrick). These conservative missionaries

made sure Hawaiians were clothed, surfing was bad, and the people were put to work… Hawaiians suffered, their culture displaced, the sacred forests fell, and their sovereignty threatened… Few dared to surf again until the 1890s when a stylish young woman, a princess… defiantly took up surfing… For princess Kaiulani, streaking to shore on a Waikiki wave was an act of rebellion. Nonviolent, joyful, a breath of life to her people” (McCoy, Jack). Because of Princess Kaiulani, “surfing was reborn to become Hawaii’s great gift to the world.” (McCoy, Jack)

Following Princess Kaiulani’s rebellion, surfing gained momentum as the popular sport in Hawaii once again and with that came beach boys, dedicated surfers who made a living shaping surf boards, lifeguarding, or teaching the art of surfing. In the early 1900s, George Freeth and his young protégé, Duke Kahanamoku became the first professional surfers, riding new surfboards made from California Redwood planks. These new surfboards were lighter, easier to shape, and easier to ride than their traditional native hardwood boards. While also being one of the first to make revolutionary improvements to the surfboard, Duke Kahanamoku is most famously known for introducing surfing to Australia. Duke was a renowned waterman in Hawaii and across the world, and in 1914 he was in Australia for the national swimming tour when on Christmas Eve, “Kahanamoku demonstrated surfing at Freshwater Beach… and supposedly set local observers scrambling to emulate his skills” (Myth-Making in Australian Sport History 62).  In 1924, an American waterman and inventor named Tom Blake visited Hawaii and immediately fell in love with the people and their culture. He became good friends with Duke Kahanamoku and for many years worked with him to try and improve surfing. In 1935 Blake attached a keel from a boat to the tail of his board which gave him way more control and made it significantly easier to surf. By this time, “Princess Kaiulani and the Waikiki beach boys had laid the foundation for modern surf culture” (McCoy, Jack).

            Merriam-Webster dictionary defines modern as “involving recent techniques, methods, or ideas: up-to-date” (Dictionary) Based on this definition I would argue that modern surf culture began in the 1960s after the release of the wildly popular movie “Gidget.” This movie boosted the popularity of surfing throughout the United States and the rest of the world. After the release of this movie, many tried to copy and recreate its success and “surfers were not impressed [by Hollywood’s b-grade imitations of the film Gidget]. They were determined to document the real surf culture, higher in spirit and adventure, down to earth, funnier, and more soulful than the phony fictional version. So, Hollywood surf movies were soon drowned by a tidal wave of popular surfing documentaries” (McCoy, Jack). In the next couple of years some of the most famous surf documentaries to this day were released, like Bruce Brown’s “The Endless Summer” and George Greenough’s “The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun.” At the same time that this surf documentary revolution was happening, a young native Hawaiian, David Nuuhiwa, moved to California and became surfing’s first “Rockstar.” Nuuhiwa was one of, if not the best long boarder in the world, “he grew up in Waikiki, juniored at Makaha, and was mentored by Donald Takayama… David was graceful and catlike on a longboard. He pushed the [board] as far as it could go and into the hearts of modern nose riders” (McCoy, Jack). By the late 60s and early 70s people started riding shorter boards called hybrids, which evolved into the modern short board. The short board had overthrown the longboard’s twenty-year reign and because of this “A new wave of inspired film makers would present the short board revolution and its stars to a fast-growing surf culture” (McCoy, Jack).

Although the modern shortboards were shorter and faster, allowing surfers to go deeper in the tube and “venture into extreme surfing” (McCoy, Jack), many native Hawaiians did not like these new boards at their breaks. These new shortboards ended up “upsetting Hawaiians for whom surfing was akin to a communing with nature” (Gibson, Chris, and Andrew Warren), but there was nothing they could do about this new wave of surfing that was taking over, it was the newest evolution of surf culture. Starting in the mid-70s there were many improvements made to surfboards, specifically the fins of boards. The first was invented by Ben Aipa, he invented a new style of surfboards called a sting. This board had a wide rounded nose with a squared off tail. The most important part of this board was that Aipa decided to move the fin forward, making the board easier to turn and control, allowing surfers to do the first clean 360s while on the face of the wave. In the late 70s, Reno Abellira and Mark Richards created a new board called the twin fin. This board was shorter with a wider tail and the two fins were near the outside of the tail rather than the middle creating less drag than a single fin, allowing surfers to go much faster. In 1981, Simon Anderson created the tri-fin. This combined almost the same speed as the twin fin and the carving ability of the single fin. This board allowed Anderson to win 3 pro-contests in one year, including the pipeline masters, and has become the standard configuration of shortboards for over 20 years and is still the choice of most surfers to this day.

Moving back in time a little, “professional surfing competitions came late in the development of modern surfing” (McCoy, Jack). It wasn’t until the late 1950s that we see the first surfing competition, which took place at Makaha Beach and the winner was considered the unofficial world champion of surfing. In 1968, the first official world champion of surfing was crowned, Fred Hemmings Jr. after winning the World Amateur Championship in Rincon, Puerto Rico. After this huge win for Hemmings, he decided that he was going to start a professional tour for surfers to determine who was truly the greatest surfer in the world. In his system, “competitors score points at various contests throughout the year with the championship going to the surfer with the most accumulated points” (Schmitt, Robert). This professional tour has evolved into the World Surf League that we know today. The World Surf League uses a similar point system to score each surfer in the tour as the one that Hemmings invented back in the late 60s. Surfing competitions were not originally as large and popular as they are today. For almost the first 20 years of surf competitions, winners did not win any money, it wasn’t until 1969, at the Fifth Annual Duke Kahanamoku Invitation Surfing Championship, that the first-place surfer was awarded a prize of $1,000. In 1970, at the Smirnoff Pro-Am meet, which was organized by Fred Hemmings at Makaha Beach, the first-place prize grew to $3,000: “In 1971, the most prestigious professional surfing tournament – Pipeline Masters – held its first contest. Today it’s the apex of surfing’s Triple Crown, following contests at Haleiwa and Sunset Beach, and the winner walks away with prize money in the tens of thousands” (Schmitt, Robert). As a part of my research I had the opportunity to interview famous Pipeline surfer and actor Tamayo Perry. In this interview I asked him how he had seen the surf culture evolve just throughout his life and his answer was very interesting. He said “When I was growing up it was probably the peak of commercial professional surfing… that being said… nowadays, it seems to me… there’s like a formula almost now. Whereas, before it was just your own passions and dreams kind of pulled you towards the next level” (Perry, Tamayo). This is interesting because you would never really notice something like that from the outside looking in but from his perspective it is easy to see what he means.

Clearly the evolution of the Hawaiian surf culture has come a long way. It started as a lifestyle for the ancient native Hawaiians and gave them a way to feel connected with the ocean, riding extremely long boards with no fins and with little control over their boards. In just 200 years the surf culture has evolved into what we see today. Very short boards with three fins and total control of the board, competition surfing with an official world champion crowned at the end of each season, and surfers being able to make a living from not only competing in competitions but also from sponsorships with big name corporations including Quicksilver, Billabong, and Volcom. I think that in this day and age most people view surfing as just another sport, the same way they would soccer or football, but I think that Tamayo Perry said it best in our interview when he said “If you surf you know that its… there’s so much more to it than just being a sport, it’s pretty much a lifestyle in that sense” (Perry, Tamayo). I think that to completely appreciate it, you need to appreciate the culture and the evolution of that surf culture in the place where this amazing lifestyle began.

For the revision of this first project, I made many different corrections to the paper. The first thing that I did was I fixed a couple different comma splices in my first couple of paragraphs. I used a comma to separate two complete sentences rather than starting a new sentence or using a semicolon to separate them. I went back and fixed these errors by adding semicolons to two of the sentences and then making one sentence into two as I felt fit. I also moved the last sentence of my second paragraph because it seemed like it was just stuck at the end and sort of interrupted the whole flow of the paragraph. I moved this entire sentence towards the middle of the paragraph where I felt it fit better and allowed to paragraph to continue to flow. I also changed some word choices that I made in the third paragraph that made the sentence make more sense. In the fourth paragraph I changed the wording where I mistook the rhetoric for the rhetor. And finally, I changed some words to make the sentence more clear to those who do not completely understand football lingo. This word change also helped to make the sentence easier to read and follow.

I have been playing football for almost my entire life. I played flag football when I was
really little, moved up to a developmental league when I was probably 8, started playing football for my middle school when I was in seventh grade, and then moved up to the varsity team my ninth-grade year. Basically, what I am trying to tell you is that I have lived and breathed football for as long as I can remember; it has been my community for my entire life. When I wasn’t out on the field practicing, I was face down in my computer studying football through the genre of digital media. For me, this genre consisted of two main sub-genres, our playbook and film.

The sub-genre of the playbook is a huge part of football. It used the rhetorical appeal of logos, because without it players would run around the field aimlessly and it would be an unorganized mess. Our playbook consisted of dozens of plays that were drawn up by our offensive and defensive coordinators and then posted on a website called Hudl where we, the players, would then have access to them. I feel like a very common stereotype of football players, especially at the high school and college level, is that they are “meatheads.” They are not very intelligent or do not make very good grades; all they care about is football. While this may be true in some cases, the majority of the time it is completely false. Football players have to be very intelligent to memorize the dozens and dozens of plays in their playbook. They have to not only know where to line up and what their assignments are, but they have to be smart enough to be able to apply that on the field where there are eleven other players trying to stop them from doing those things. The coaches were the rhetors and would post new plays every week and it was our responsibility as the players to read and memorize them before the next practice. The audience of this genre would be the players that need to memorize the playbook.
The exigence of the playbook is to allow the players to know what to do and where to line up when the coach says specific words. For example, one of the offensive plays is left Lucy gun. When the coach says left it tells the tight end to line up on the left, when he says Lucy it tells the running back he should line up on the left side of the quarterback, when he says gun it tells the quarterback he should be in shotgun formation, and when he says 207 it is telling the wide receivers what routes to run, from left to right. The farthest left receiver runs a two route, the next runs a zero, and the farthest right runs a seven. On the defensive side it is pretty much the same, just a little less complicated. One of our defensive plays for example was strong Steelers bullets four. Strong Steelers tells the defensive line to line up four guys down on the line and shifted to the strong side, bullets tells both of the middle linebackers to blitz, and four tells the secondary that they should be in cover four.

The constraints of the playbook are that it honestly cannot take into account the fact that there will be eleven extra players on the field that will be trying to stop them from executing that play. On the offensive side of the ball there are eleven defensive players trying to stop them from scoring on that play, on the defensive side of the ball there are eleven offensive players who are trying to block them and score every play. Another constraint of the playbook is that it is not always the easiest to memorize. Most of the time there are tons of different plays, and depending on what position you play, you might have to memorize many different things on each play. For example, the quarterback must know what route every wide receiver is running on every play, what gap the running back is running in, if they are supposed to leave the pocket, and if they are, what side they are supposed to roll out to.

The other genre that I used a lot in football, probably more so than I did the playbook,
was film. We watched film every Monday for an hour of practice, 30 minutes of watching our own film and then 30 minutes of watching our upcoming opponents’ film who we were playing that upcoming Friday. We were also expected to watch film every day on our own. Our coaches used the rhetorical appeal of pathos and logos to get us to watch film. Pathos because if you did not watch film, they would chew you out and you would most likely have to run, and logos because if you did not watch film you would not play as well in the game. The exigence of watching your own film was so you could see where you messed up in the last game and so you can correct your mistakes and not make them again, the exigence of watching the opponents film was to be able to tell what plays they were potentially going to run based on the formation they lined up in. If you watched enough of the opponent’s film, and really studied it, you would start to see a pattern. Teams would only run a few different plays out of certain formations, so when they lined up in those formations you knew that they could only be running a couple of different plays. Once you knew what plays they ran, that would help you to be able to read the offensive line and figure out where the ball was going in a matter of seconds. The audience of this genre is the players who are watching the film, and also the coaches who study the film so they can give the players insight into what they messed up on in the last game and how to improve for the next game and also so they can implement new plays that they think will work better based on what plays the other team runs.

The constraints of watching the other team’s film is that each week most teams put in new plays to throw off their opponents who did watch a lot of film. Another constraint of watching film, more specifically a technological constraint, was that because this was only high school football, the games looked like they were filmed on a flip phone and a lot of the time it was really hard to tell who was who or where the ball was. In high school, you could always tell who was on the football team in each classroom you walked into. Not because of their size or the way that they looked like, because we were not the biggest group of guys, but because every single one of us were constantly watching film during the school day. Especially as we got closer to Fridays, the only thing that I had pulled up on my computer was film, I watched it during almost every class, and the majority of the time the teachers knew what was up and they did not seem to care.

This media of the playbook and film really helped my community, that was the football team, to play better. Because of these visual modes our football team went on to win every game except eight my senior year and seven my junior, sophomore, and freshman years. Basically, what I am trying to say is that clearly some players on my football team did not watch enough film or study the playbook enough, because we were bad, and I mean like really bad. But even though we were not the best team in our division, surprisingly we weren’t the worst either, we were still a very tight knit community of brothers that I will have for the rest of my life. There is something about going through three hour practices and workouts every day for four years and all of the extra running you had to do because you did not memorize the entirety of the playbook, and the coach happened to call that one play that you did not know that practice, or because you forgot to watch film that day and the coach found out, that really brings a group of guys together. Football has been my life for the past eighteen years and has shaped me into the man I am today. I owe a lot to my coaches, teammates, and just the game of football as a whole, without it I would not have made the lifelong friendships and relationships that I have today. I remember even a couple times I made friends from other schools because of their film. I watched this one guys film, a wide receiver from a rival school, and I followed him and sent him a message through the film app, and we talked a lot of smack before our game and ended up staying in touch after that. A couple of months later, we competed against each other in a weightlifting meet, where he beat me just like he beat us in football.