GLH10302-Research Freewrite

George Lewis Hughes

English 103: Accelerated Composition – Freewriting about Your Research Topic (Alfano 96)

Daniel Richards

September 19, 2008

Research Freewrite: Visual Rhetoric Thesis Two: Shellshock as a Bridge between Nihilism and Society, Three-paragraph Model

“Shellshock,” formally referred to as post-traumatic stress syndrome, became the leading psychological reason for the inhumanity to all war in the modern sense, beginning with its first victims during the First World War. Even today is it seen, enough to question the further viability of the world’s governments to take authority over how its human components to the military are exploited and expended to the benefit of the economically satisfactory mechanics behind the dichotomy of man versus machine in the dynamic of modern to postmodern combat. Combat has evolved to such a state of intensity since the dawn of the last century such that a serious percentage of its human components have eventually malfunctioned – and will eventually malfunction – till the point of their total inactivity and essential neutralization from the dichotomy of the situation, so as to spurn the imminent failure of the entire functioning war machine if given enough time to do so for one side of the firing range. Although the concept may at first seem too drastically radical and dramatic considering how the horrendous reception of human technology’s worst possible volleys of destruction has never necessarily liquidated the army’s ability to continue computing its next moves in full swing, it may be worth noting that the resultant percentage of returning troops from deployment recorded suffering from legitimate cases of this “bug-eyed” syndrome has steadily increased over the statistical timeline covering all other major wars previous which have been both categorized under the distinction of “modern” wars and documented at length. Tentative thesis: With the increasing potential for devastation of the staple, modern weapons used in relatively recent epochs of extensive combat, there exists a sufficiently parallel increase in reported cases of post-traumatic stress syndrome, specifically as a statistical percentage with respect to the size of the coalition deployed thereof.

To research this topic, I hope to examine a broad range of archival evidence from various news media that have delved before into the discussion on the impact of the current recorded cases of post-traumatic stress syndrome, granted that the news characteristically seems to take on such topics from the humanitarian, sentimentalist approach quite often and regularly; these particular resources will best reinforce my thesis from the angle of its blatant importance concerning its attention from the civilian mainframe of governmental society. Citing books along with other scholarly sources, however, will prove endemic to the more credibility side of the thesis, whether from the analytical standpoint of the psychologist or the Army Red Cross.

The most difficult part of this assignment will likely be having to find the right news articles on the topic at hand, let alone having to decipher and interpret the professional jargon that I will inevitably have to encounter through my declared, various explorations of hard documentation, all on the order of what most researchers would generally consider to be “dense” material. This more scholarly attempt at backing, however, will prove entirely necessary since the topic’s clinical attributes are just as critical to the credibility of the argument which will be expounding upon – and most importantly defending – my thesis.