Sports Bully Culture Rhetorical Analysis

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John Amaechi is no newcomer to bullying in sports. He has been both the victim and the witness. Experience allows him to use ethos, pathos, and logos in a compelling essay to educate athletes and coaches in “Sports’ Bully Culture”. Amaechi uses the three appeals to help his audience understand why bullying in sports is intolerable. Ethos is all about appealing to character. This is something that Amaechi has mastered. He uses various techniques in doing so, such as showing practical wisdom, value, and disinterest. Amaechi uses practical wisdom by explaining his personal experience in sports bullying. When he was playing sports at University, “[Amaechi] had an assistant coach who would engineer drills to maximize the chance of fighting or …show more content…
Showing his experience and expertise helps Amaechi when it comes to all three of the appeals. One of the key factors of logos is getting your audience to trust you, and Amaechi spends most of his essay building his credibility through story telling and behaviour he has witnessed. Once he has the trust of his readers, he appeals to their logic by driving his points home through showing cause and effect. Amaechi refers to Rice once more by getting the reader to think of all the men his coaching style must have affected through his career. He explains how “That kind of poison infects and potentially manifests in all but the most resilient of them” (2). The cause is Rice’s actions and the effect is the mental and emotional state of all of the athletes Rice bullied in his career. Amaechi is using this logic to prove to current and future coaches that it is their job to help build strong athletes by motivating them in positive ways. Amaechi ruthlessly attacks the topic of bullying in sports by using the three appeals and strong arguments to get his readers to side with him. He wants his targeted audience to understand how severe of an issue it is, and how many lives it impacts on a daily basis. He ends off with the suggestion that it is for the good of both present day and future athletes that we review the coaching methods that are currently practiced, and find a way to keep them from being detrimental in the lives of people involved

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