Barbara Ehrenreich enacts the rhetorical appeal pathos, an emotional and experiential appeal, to develop her argument in her essay Serving in Florida. In her essay, Ehrenreich uses pathos to show that the living and working conditions of those in the service industry are far from ideal. Ehrenreich draws on her personal experience to display to readers the bleak and depressing lives of workers in the service industry. By using pathos, Ehrenreich is using both experience and emotional stories to draw the reader’s attention to the inhumane working and living conditions that most waitresses/waiters face. To strengthen her argument, Barbara Ehrenreich uses four main rhetorical devices: exemplum, enumeratio, metaphor, and procatalepsis. Ehrenreich utilizes exemplum to emphasize the harrowing living and working conditions of workers in the service industry by providing examples of the lives of her fellow employees. In using enumeratio and metaphor, Ehrenreich is conveying the gruesome details of the workplace environment for most service workers. With her use of procatalepsis, Ehrenreich refutes the idea that the poor have come up with some “secret way” to live simply without sacrificing anything major.
