Why she must defend her strong clear vision

Before I started watching the Maya Lin documentary, I wrote down two questions that would help me focus more on the rhetoric of the film making. After watching the documentary, I’ve decided I don’t want to write about the director’s rhetoric. What came on stronger, what had more of a presence was the rhetoric in Maya Lin’s monuments. The same way a rhetorician chooses specific elements in making an argument, Maya Lin chooses specific elements to serve her purpose for the monument.

Let me get back to those two questions. First I asked “Why would the director choose one rhetoric device over others?” second: “What would it be like if they hadn’t chosen those devices?” These questions were initially supposed to get me to think about how the different cinematic and rhetorical components were used to facilitate the film makers point. The questions in the context of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial architecture are still applicable. Why would Lin choose to design the memorial the way she did? What if she did it differently?

Applying the rhetoric to something other than the written word also put into perspective how crucial the different elements of rhetoric we’re learning about are. The different components of Maya Lin’s monument design support a purpose. She wanted to “focus on the nature of accepting and coming to terms with a loved one’s death”. The same way ideas need to be chosen for an argument carefully, architecture and are also need to have specific ideas that feed into the core meaning. Maya Lin realized what she wanted her monument to mean, thus she knew how it should look. The veterans who demanded a change in Lin's design did not know that changing the design would make the monument irrelevant.