Ellen Goodman Rhetorical Analysis

Ellen Goodman uses rhetorical strategies, pathos, and ethos, to show her distaste for Phil. She uses these strategies in a way that makes Phil a bad guy. She talks about his love for his job, his “love” for his children, and his way of life to make him out to be terrible.
She uses pathos to show his “love” for his wife and his “dearly beloved” by saying, “But it did list his ‘survivors’ quite accurately,” by putting survivors in quotation marks she implies that he didn’t care enough about the people mentioned in it for him to be survived by them. His wife had stopped trying to compete with his work years ago, when their children were small. A company friend said he knew how much she would miss him and she said she already has. That implies …show more content…
She kept repeating that he was a perfect type A, a workaholic, a classic. The man who finally, and precisely, at 3 a.m. worked himself to death, on his day off. He was so addicted to work he was still working at 3 a.m. Sunday morning on his day off. He worked way too much for his job and not enough for his family. His family would have loved to get half as much attention from him as he gave to his work. He worked six days a week, five of them until eight or nine at night. He did this when his own company had started working 4 days a week for everyone except the executives. He spent extra time on his work that he could have spent taking his wife to dinner or taking his family out to a movie or a game. He didn’t do anything other than work besides his monthly golf game which he considered work. He was overweight and always ate egg salad sandwiches. He didn’t mind because he didn’t smoke. Being overweight and being a type A, a heart-attack natural, doesn’t fit in well with being nervous and working too hard. Being nervous makes your heart beat faster and