Maya Lin's dedication to her vision!

Maya Lin the documentary really showed the strength in Maya Lin's dedication to her work. The memorial she designed was strong in her eyes and her defending of it was something that stood out to me while watching the film. When addressing groups of people about her vision, I noticed her rhetorical strategy of stating that she was not good at addressing people in order to draw people into the amazing things she was about to say about her work. Also, through the film I was amazed by her words that described her vision. She says straight out in the beginning of the film that she wanted people to cry when seeing her memorial. This to me is a rhetorical strategy, pulling out all human emotion upon touching and seeing names of loved ones that are not forever gone in these loved ones hearts. She also says that these loved ones need to accept and admit pain, again pulling at not just the viewers of the memorial's emotions but also at the viewers of the film. The way she strategically described the cutting of the earth and pointing one end to Lincoln and another to Washington was interesting to me and also was a way to draw viewers in as if they were viewing the memorial itself rather than a film. She focused on death as a private matter all through out the film which makes viewers of the film, or at least me, recall deaths of loved ones and tugged at emotions that made viewers like us feel involved in her process.

Much like in the film in the article "Making of the Memorial" Maya Lin uses some of the same phrases and techniques to make us feel like she is presenting the memorial to us individually. When she used the evidence of the tally of Smiths that had died in the war it made me completely agree to her chronological order of the names, I agreed it was "key to the experience." She also draws us in because of her innocence when she admits that it never occurred to her that she would win. This makes us feel she was an extreme underdog, which technically she was, and makes us root for her. I also loved how she addressed the fact that all the names on her design were presented as equals, all names that served no matter what race, creed, or sex which makes us again agree to her memorial.

All in all I loved hearing Maya Lin's story both through the documentary presentation that showed her view and hard work and through her story in the "Making the Memorial" article. Her color choice, simplicity and hard work all made me glad she was the one who created such a great memorial.