Reading Over the course of the semester, one of our goals was the improve our reading abilities in a way that chiseled our talents in identifying, analyzing, and evaluating different arguments and select examples of pathos, logos, and ethos. Pathos is the use of emotional arguments, logos is the use of logical arguments, and ethos is the use of another person’s credibility when composing an argument.
My First encounter with attempting to analyze a persuasive argument was during the composition of the Rhetorical Situations Blog. While trying to identify the rhetorical differences in their arguments, I was unable to, which was made obvious when my major differences in two arguments were articulated as, “Although Farris and Morrison share similar views, Farris’ language has sarcastic undertones while criticizing the ANWR proposal while Morrison’s has urgent and serious undertones.” I focused more on analyzing the tones used in their writing than the actual differences in their arguments or rhetorical elements they employed.
During Dean Herron’s speech on Ossian Sweet, I was much better able to identify examples of pathos and logos in my i-Search paper, although I did not label them as such. The first example is a sample of logos being identified, where I mention, “Throughout the speech, Herron tried to convince us that the past influences the present which influences the future and that we, as a society, will never be able to escape the past.” The second example is pulled from my argumentative essay, where I note a pathos argument made by the dean, stating, “…the Dean mentioned that he believes every honors college student should know about what happened to Ossian Sweet and the injustices of the time period represented by his case because it say something about humanity and about “us” as a community.” I was able to, without directly stating it, identify and analyze rhetorical elements. Writing In writing, I improved upon my abilities to write while keeping in mind my use of pathos, logos, and ethos. Particularly with pathos, I showed a great growth in my ability to compose pathos arguments while being aware of the audience and their prior biases. My start in applying pathos arguments and keeping in mind an audience came from a workshop where the class was asked to compose a basic argument given a particular speaker and situation. The speaker my group received was Kanye West speaking to his lawyers about failing an English exam. In a letter to his lawyer, we imagined he would write something similar to, “If you got my back, I’ll hit you up with that real money.” Pathos was used in the sense that the reader, Kanye’s lawyer, would feel inclined to act if money was presented to him. The genre was obviously ignored, as it sounds as if Kanye were speaking more to a friend than a lawyer. After some much more intensive work, I was able to compose my argumentative essay. I mentioned, “Some of the most recent hate crimes that resulted in the deaths of Asian Americans are the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin and the subway murder of Sunado in 2012 and the beating and choking of David Kao in 2009.” Here, I was creating a pathos based argument, using the recent murders of three Asian Americans as a reason to why ethnic hate killings towards Asian Americans are still relevant to modern times. I also better kept in mind the audience, the board of the Filipino Student Society, when writing, as I kept a more professional manner even though I …show more content…
In my audience report, I mentioned, “An example of ethos occurs near the beginning when I borrow the thought processes and logical applications of Jerry Herron, dean of Wayne State’s Honors College.” This shows that I had a clear plan in mind, because I knew what steps I would be using during my writer to create a persuaded audience. I was clearly monitoring my own writing, because I was writing about my usages of rhetorical situations in my essay as I was completing the assignment. The evaluation of my writing would be the articulation of why I chose a certain argumentative style for a certain point I was attempting to make, in this particular case about how I used ethos to gain the trust of the Filipino Student Society’s
My First encounter with attempting to analyze a persuasive argument was during the composition of the Rhetorical Situations Blog. While trying to identify the rhetorical differences in their arguments, I was unable to, which was made obvious when my major differences in two arguments were articulated as, “Although Farris and Morrison share similar views, Farris’ language has sarcastic undertones while criticizing the ANWR proposal while Morrison’s has urgent and serious undertones.” I focused more on analyzing the tones used in their writing than the actual differences in their arguments or rhetorical elements they employed.
During Dean Herron’s speech on Ossian Sweet, I was much better able to identify examples of pathos and logos in my i-Search paper, although I did not label them as such. The first example is a sample of logos being identified, where I mention, “Throughout the speech, Herron tried to convince us that the past influences the present which influences the future and that we, as a society, will never be able to escape the past.” The second example is pulled from my argumentative essay, where I note a pathos argument made by the dean, stating, “…the Dean mentioned that he believes every honors college student should know about what happened to Ossian Sweet and the injustices of the time period represented by his case because it say something about humanity and about “us” as a community.” I was able to, without directly stating it, identify and analyze rhetorical elements. Writing In writing, I improved upon my abilities to write while keeping in mind my use of pathos, logos, and ethos. Particularly with pathos, I showed a great growth in my ability to compose pathos arguments while being aware of the audience and their prior biases. My start in applying pathos arguments and keeping in mind an audience came from a workshop where the class was asked to compose a basic argument given a particular speaker and situation. The speaker my group received was Kanye West speaking to his lawyers about failing an English exam. In a letter to his lawyer, we imagined he would write something similar to, “If you got my back, I’ll hit you up with that real money.” Pathos was used in the sense that the reader, Kanye’s lawyer, would feel inclined to act if money was presented to him. The genre was obviously ignored, as it sounds as if Kanye were speaking more to a friend than a lawyer. After some much more intensive work, I was able to compose my argumentative essay. I mentioned, “Some of the most recent hate crimes that resulted in the deaths of Asian Americans are the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin and the subway murder of Sunado in 2012 and the beating and choking of David Kao in 2009.” Here, I was creating a pathos based argument, using the recent murders of three Asian Americans as a reason to why ethnic hate killings towards Asian Americans are still relevant to modern times. I also better kept in mind the audience, the board of the Filipino Student Society, when writing, as I kept a more professional manner even though I …show more content…
In my audience report, I mentioned, “An example of ethos occurs near the beginning when I borrow the thought processes and logical applications of Jerry Herron, dean of Wayne State’s Honors College.” This shows that I had a clear plan in mind, because I knew what steps I would be using during my writer to create a persuaded audience. I was clearly monitoring my own writing, because I was writing about my usages of rhetorical situations in my essay as I was completing the assignment. The evaluation of my writing would be the articulation of why I chose a certain argumentative style for a certain point I was attempting to make, in this particular case about how I used ethos to gain the trust of the Filipino Student Society’s