Rhetorical Analysis: The Free Medical Clinic

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When authors write they must use strategies to both engage the reader and get their point across. These strategies are called rhetorical appeals and they determine whether or not a text is successful at getting the reader to see the main point. The Free Medical Clinic’s website is there to inform both potential volunteers and patients about how the clinic runs, the services provided, and opportunities that can be obtained at the clinic. The website uses many rhetorical appeals to get this point across, but it mainly uses style, pathos, and ethos to do so. Style is an identifying factor in writing; each person has their own style of writing and after a while people can even be identified as the author of a text purely upon the style of writing. …show more content…
The clinic uses pathos in its website to make people feel certain ways. The clinic assumes that all people want to help others who have health issues, but lack to finances or resources to get the services they need. To ensure that the readers ultimately feel this way the designers of the website include quotes from current and past patients of the clinic; these quotes display their gratitude for all the help they receive from volunteers and the welcoming community at the clinic. (Newsletter) Not only do they use quotes from patients, but they also include testimonials from volunteers and staff stating how good of an experience volunteering at the clinic was and that it will be something they remember forever. (Get Involved) They use these examples of patients and volunteering having good experiences there to get readers to have the urge to volunteer at such a nice place. Continuously bringing up the fact that donations are a “vital part of [their] budget” keeps bringing the urge to donate to their cause to mind, for the reader. One contradiction to using this strategy would be that the name of the clinic and website insinuate the idea that that all the medical care is free, yet they “ask for a $10 donation”. (Get Involved) Some people would see this as absurd because the patients are there because they can not afford to go anywhere else for medical treatment. Pathos is a successful strategy for …show more content…
The Free Medical Clinic’s website uses ethos in order to show the readers that they are knowledgable and in order to make the readers knowledgable as well. People will want to become associated with the clinic after they learn more about the organization. The newsletter on the website gives a lot of information about the new influx of minorities coming into the clinic and the new trends in the care that these patients need. Due to these new trends, they include a list of goals for the future in order to counteract the shift. (Newsletter) Now that they have established that they know a lot about their organization and its needs the website must also inform the readers about their organization. They do this by providing a lot of information about what they do at the clinic, volunteering opportunities, and current events. A good example of this is the section of the website that talks about volunteer positions; in this section there are detailed descriptions of what each position must do and the qualifications individuals must have in order to volunteer in that position. (Get Involved) The clinic uses ethos in its website as its main way of informing the public about their work and recruiting new volunteers and people to donate. The rhetorical appeals used in the website establish ways for readers to connect and know the message of the Free

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