Rhetorical Analysis Of Small Change

In the article Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted the author Malcolm Gladwell states how social media has “weak ties” which means that it has weaker bond towards the people, while interacting with people have a stronger bond. In my perspective I agree with the writer about his statement, although there are some rhetorical devices that the author used to emphasize his point that does not have as much impact as the other devices. Some of the rhetorical devices he used to emphasize his argument was logos, pathos, and he used an example that could be a false analogy and a generalization fallacy. The piece that Gladwell talks about in his article was the civil rights movement that involved four college freshmen at North Carolina …show more content…
Once example of this was during the civil rights movement when the writer started describing how intense it was going. He stated that people started to notice how intense and dangerous it getting. Because of the tension going on things like bomb threats, kidnappings, murder, and people were getting beaten, shot, or arrested kept increasing throughout the protest (405). Gladwell would use pathos to make the audience feel the emotions or connect to the emotions to help them understand what the people felt throughout the civil rights movement. The author would use words like “beaten, shot, killed, threat, and danger” (404-405) to describe what was happening throughout the movement. Gladwell would also use words such as highly committed, goals, values, and articulate to describe the people that joined the protest. The author wanted the audience to feel that the people were good, brave, and committed. He wanted the audience to think highly of them because they joined this civil rights movement to make and impact and make a change in the world. By using pathos in his article, he conveyed how people had “strong ties” (405) because they were committed to help their friends, neighbors, the community make their impact to have …show more content…
In my opinion he did persuade most of his audience to agree with his opinion, although there were some flaws when using rhetorical devices. In this essay I identified some of the rhetorical devices and also his flaws which included the fallacies. The critique essay hopefully shows the reader the evaluation I did for this article and conveys a better understanding to what Gladwell was persuading his audience to agree with his