Rhetorical Analysis By Ehrenreich

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In an attempt to expose the poverty and limited opportunities of poorer class citizens in the American economy, Ehrenreich utilizes personalized anecdotes to demonstrate the workers’ struggles. By discussing her temporary experience in the workforce, Ehrenreich provides compelling examples of her social experiment to promote awareness of the lower class situation. Specifically, Ehrenreich attempts to convince the reader that it is more difficult for a person to exhume themselves from poverty than previously believed. Relying on the sympathy of the reader, she immerses herself into the life of a poor-class citizen and conducts experiments of her own design in which she believes she does all she can to succeed with minimum wage jobs. Furthermore, …show more content…
Most importantly, however, Smith’s video is filled with elemental appeals to morality and character as an attempt to make a deeper connection with the audience. For example, he provides a “plain folks appeal” when he says that he, a television figure, has watched the Titanic. This forges a familiarity between him and his audience and ultimately makes the audience more willing to hear out the rest of his argument. In addition, he uses statistics to scare the audience into believing that the rising of sea levels does not only affect Greenland, but also the common people. To provide an example of this, there is an animation of all of the land that would be drowned under water if the ice melted and the video suggests that all of these people would be forced to move. By providing the situation with not only an eco-systemic crisis but a human crisis as well, Smith makes the audience much more susceptible to listen to his argument. Furthermore, he provides logical evidence and numerical statistics such as the fact that every year, Greenland alone loses 140-billion tons of ice. In addition, as a last attempt to win the audience’s support over, Smith provides a plan of action as a way for people to have a starting point for change. Although this plan of action which is to cut greenhouse emissions by eighty-percent may seem somewhat ambitious to some, he goes on to list a few examples of how this could be done on a daily basis. So, by providing the audience with appeals to their character as well as with statistical evidence, Smith’s attempts to enforce a stronger support for the recognition that sea levels are rising more

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