Rhetorical Analysis Of The Article 'What Does It Mean To Die?'

Can you imagine a thirteen-year-old girl, who was healthy but had to take her tonsils out go from getting her tonsils removed to a near-death experience. In Rachel Aviv’s article “What Does It Mean To Die?” goes into a deeper meaning of false result on being brain dead. Aviv’s article uses Jahi’s story to prove that there is a lot of confusion between being brain dead and having the brain injury. Aviv uses rhetorical devices, like ethos, pathos, imagery and repetition to persuade her audience that showing a patient with no brain activity seen does not mean they are not dead. The author first uses the case of Jahi; there was a chance for her. Jahi is a thirteen-year-old girl who was not planning for her life to be in …show more content…
Aviv uses professors and researchers to support. She goes into gives sources like Troug, the director of the Center of Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, who goes into depth of how social opinions impact medical treatment of others of certain color. Aviv uses Troug’s credibility to emphasize Jahi’s mistreatment at the hospital she originally was being held at. Aviv did a good job with letting the audience know the discrimination in hospitals an malpractice amongst racist doctors and nurses. But this was not the only problem Aviv exposes. At a large scale, this problem started when the change in “the notion that death could be diagnosed in the brain (Aviv)’’. Aviv exposes this change in the conclusion of death and how it went from the death meaning that your heart stopped to your brain not functioning the way it is supposed to. Another way Aviv relates ethos is by using D.Alan Shewmon, a retired chief of the neurology department at the Olive View U.C.L.A Medical Center. Aviv utilizes him for a good amount of her article as a reliable source. Aviv displays that his interactions with the big example of the article, Jahi’s case. The writer then gives you a background of Shewmon to let the audience know the knowledge he has on this specific topic regarding the brain scans of Jahi. Aviv gives him more credit by using another neurologist’s, James Bernat, a neurologist at Dartmouth, opinion on D. Alan Shewmon to prove to the audience that he is a credible man. She goes about letting the audience know that he has studied cases like Jahi’s. He called it “chronic survival (Aviv, Shewman). The way the writer bestows ethos in this article is very charismatic. She infuses this literary device to make a persuasive impact. She uses Shewman not only for Jahi’s cases, but to also to show that she is not the only case with these condition. She uses a case that Shewman research on