Rhetorical Analysis

Pathos, Ethos, and Logos:write two paragraph analysis the article “me talk pretty one day”, one pathos, one logos. please read the analysis copy one to know about how to analysis the article and the article “me talk pretty one day”is in the file also. three ways, Pathos, Ethos, and Logos:

i have write one pathos, and i put mine down there. i need two paragraph , one pathos and one ethos.

David Sedaris used Patho with describing his fears and struggles of being a foreigner and lacks of the confidence to speak the French. “My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of my classroom and accompanied me out onto the wide boulevards.Stopping for coffee, asking directions, depositing money in my bank account: these things were out of the question, as they involved having to speak.” Through those sentence he express these fears were not only in class, but they became all round, and he feared to do many simple things, such as buy a cup of coffee,answer the call or go to the bank, because of he think that everything he said was wrong. By his well words, we can imagine that we are in his class, we can feels his afraid together, just look like the first time I came to United States. He’s sentences describe a sad scene, I can feel his helpless, he afraid go everywhere. If the author only describes this matter with ordinary declarative sentences, look like “I am afraid go everywhere.” In this case, it is difficult for readers to feel his emotions.

RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

Rhetoric is the study of how writers and speakers use words to influence an audience. A rhetorical analysis is an essay that breaks a work of non-fiction into parts and then explains how the parts work together to create a certain effect—whether to persuade, entertain or inform. You can also conduct a rhetorical analysis of a primarily visual argument such as a cartoon or advertisement, or an oral performance such as a speech.

A rhetorical analysis should explore the rhetorician’s goals, the techniques (or tools) used, examples of those techniques, and the effectiveness of those techniques. When writing a rhetorical analysis, you are NOT saying whether or not you agree with the argument. Instead, you’re discussing how the rhetorician makes that argument and whether or not the approach used is successful.

Appeals: Pathos, Ethos, and Logos:

1. Pathos invokes the audience’s emotion to gain acceptance and approval for the ideas expressed. When using this appeal, rhetoricians tap a reader’s sympathy and compassion, anger and disappointment, desire for love, or sadness to convince the audience of their argument. Effective rhetoricians can create these feelings in an audience even if the feeling wasn’t there before.

Ex. TV commercials asking viewers to sponsor a third world child appeal to the viewer’s compassion and instinct to protect the innocent.

2. Ethos uses the writer’s own credibility and character to make a case and gain approval. Rhetoricians use themselves and their position as an “expert” or as a “good person” to give their argument presence and importance. An everyday example of this is a minister, rabbi, priest, or shaman—individuals who are followed because they have established themselves as moral authorities. Writers using ethos may offer a definition for an obscure term or detailed statistics to establish their authority and knowledge.

Ex. A speaker from the American Heart Association visiting a kinesiology class to talk about healthy lifestyle choices is a practical example of ethos.

3. Logos uses reason to make a case. Academic discourse is mostly logos-driven because academic audiences respect scholarship and evidence. Rhetoricians using logos rely on evidence and proof, whether the proof is hard data or careful reasoning.

Ex.1 In his Divine Watchmaker argument, William Paley employs logical comparison to prove that something as complex as life and our world could not have occurred by chance.

Ex.2 Toothpaste commercials like to appeal to logos by citing statistics and using scientific language to describe the process of preventing cavities.

Remember that a single document, speech, or advertisement can make all three appeals. Rhetoricians will often combine techniques in order to create a persuasive argument.

Your assignment:

Prewriting: Ask yourself questions:

In writing an effective rhetorical analysis, you should discuss the goal or purpose of the piece; the appeals, evidence, and techniques used and why; examples of those appeals, evidence, and techniques; and your explanation of why they did or didn’t work. A good place to start is to answer each of these considerations in a sentence or two on a scratch piece of paper. Don’t worry about how it sounds—just answer the questions.

Thesis, Body, and Conclusion

After brainstorming and doing the actual analysis, you are ready to write a thesis. Remember to choose the three (or four) techniques for which you can make the strongest case. Rhetoricians employ many techniques; focus on the ones that are the most prevalent or interesting and that you can describe persuasively.

P1: Introduction – info about the author, the context in which this piece of writing was written, the audience for this piece, a statement about the author’s purpose, and your thesis.

P2: A summary of the writing to be analyzed.

P3, P4, P5, P6 – Three to four analysis paragraphs:

Each body paragraph should have its own topic sentence. Make sure every idea or sentence in a paragraph relates to its topic sentence; you don’t want to jump between topics. It gives your paper a sense of cohesion to place your body paragraphs in the same order in which they’re presented in your introduction. Consider how you will organize the paragraphs. Will you discuss each technique—every instance of ethos, then every instance of pathos, and finally every instance of logos—then end with a discussion of the overall effectiveness? Or will you review the essay in terms of the least effective technique to the most effective? Or will you use a chronological order, discussing each technique as it occurs sequentially?

For each paragraph, give several examples and explain how those examples illustrate the technique being discussed. At the end of each body paragraph, make sure you connect your topic sentence back to your thesis. This creates cohesion, solidifies your argument, and provides a transition to your next topic.

P7: Your own opinion about the topic discussed

P:8 Your conclusion should briefly restate your main argument – How effective or ineffective the author was as he/she tried to convince/persuade his/her audience. It should then apply your argument on a higher level. Why does your argument matter? What does it mean in the real world?

Me Talk Pretty One Day

BY DAVID SEDARIS

JAN 29, 2007

At the age of forty-one, I am returning to school and having to think of myself as what my French textbook calls “a true debutant.” After paying my tuition, I was issued a student ID, which allows me a discounted entry fee at movie theaters, puppet shows, and Festyland, a far-flung amusement park that advertises with billboards picturing a cartoon stegosaurus sitting in a canoe and eating what appears to be a ham sandwich.

I’ve moved to Paris in order to learn the language. My school is an easy ten-minute walk from my apartment, and on the first day of class, I arrived early, watching as the returning students greeted one another in the school lobby. Vacations were recounted, and questions were raised concerning mutual friends with names like Kang and Vlatnya. Regardless of their nationalities, everyone spoke what sounded to me like excellent French. Some accents were better than others, but the students exhibited an ease and confidence I found intimidating. As an added discomfort, they were all young, attractive, and well dressed, causing me to feel not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage after a fashion show.

The first day of class was nerve-racking, because I knew I’d be expected to perform. That’s the way they do it here–everyone into the language pool, sink or swim. The teacher marched in, deeply tanned from a recent vacation, and rattled off a series of administrative announcements. I’ve spent some time in Normandy, and I took a monthlong French class last summer in New York. I’m not completely in the dark, yet I understood only half of what this teacher was saying.

“If you have not meismslsxp by this time, you should not be in this room. Has everybody apzkiubjxow? Everyone? Good, we shall proceed.” She spread out her lesson plan and sighed, saying, “All right, then, who knows the alphabet?”

It was startling, because a) I hadn’t been asked that question in a while, and b) I realized, while laughing, that I myself did not know the alphabet. They’re the same letters, but they’re pronounced differently. I know the shape of the alphabet but had no idea what it actually sounded like.

“Ahh.” The teacher went to the board and sketched the letter a. “Do we have anyone in the room whose first name commences with an ahh?”

Two Polish Annas raised their hands, and the teacher instructed them to present themselves, giving their names, nationalities, occupations, and a list of things they liked and disliked in this world. The first Anna hailed from an industrial town outside of Warsaw and had front teeth the size of tombstones. She worked as a seamstress, enjoyed quiet times with friends, and hated the mosquito.

“Oh, really,” the teacher said. “How very interesting. I thought that everyone loved the mosquito, but here, in front of all the world, you claim to detest him. How is it that we’ve been blessed with someone as unique and original as you? Tell us, please.”

The seamstress did not understand what was being said, but she knew that this was an occasion for shame. Her rabbity mouth huffed for breath, and she stared down at her lap as though the appropriate comeback were stitched somewhere alongside the zipper of her slacks.

The second Anna learned from the first and claimed to love sunshine and detest lies. It sounded like a translation of one of those Playmate of the Month data sheets, the answers always written in the same loopy handwriting: “Turn-ons: Mom’s famous five-alarm chili! Turnoffs: Insincerity and guys who come on too strong!!!”

The two Polish women surely had clear notions of what they liked and disliked, but, like the rest of us, they were limited in terms of vocabulary, and this made them appear less than sophisticated. The teacher forged on, and we learned that Carlos, the Argentine bandonion player, loved wine, music, and, in his words, “Making sex with the women of the world.” Next came a beautiful young Yugoslavian who identified herself as an optimist, saying that she loved everything life had to offer.

The teacher licked her lips, revealing a hint of the sadist we would later come to know. She crouched low for her attack, placed her hands on the young woman’s desk, and said, “Oh, yeah? And do you love your little war?”

While the optimist struggled to defend herself, I scrambled to think of an answer to what had obviously become a trick question. How often are you asked what you love in this world? More important, how often are you asked and then publicly ridiculed for your answer? I recalled my mother, flushed with wine, pounding the table late one night, saying, “Love? I love a good steak cooked rare. I love my cat, and I love . . .” My sisters and I leaned forward, waiting to hear our names. “Tums,” our mother said. “I love Tums.”

The teacher killed some time accusing the Yugoslavian girl of masterminding a program of genocide, and I jotted frantic notes in the margins of my pad. While I can honestly say that I love leafing through medical textbooks devoted to severe dermatological conditions, it is beyond the reach of my French vocabulary, and acting it out would only have invited unwanted attention.

When called upon, I delivered an effortless list of things I detest: blood sausage, intestinal pâté, brain pudding. I’d learned these words the hard way. Having given it some thought, I then declared my love for IBM typewriters, the French word for “bruise,” and my electric floor waxer. It was a short list, but still I managed to mispronounce IBM and afford the wrong gender to both the floor waxer and the typewriter. Her reaction led me to believe that these mistakes were capital crimes in the country of France.

“Were you always this palicmkrexjs?” she asked. “Even a fiuscrzsws tociwegixp knows that a typewriter is feminine.”

I absorbed as much of her abuse as I could understand, thinking, but not saying, that I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to Lady Flesh Wound or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?

The teacher proceeded to belittle everyone from German Eva, who hated laziness, to Japanese Yukari, who loved paintbrushes and soap. Italian, Thai, Dutch, Korean, Chinese–we all left class foolishly believing that the worst was over. We didn’t know it then, but the coming months would teach us what it is like to spend time in the presence of a wild animal. We soon learned to dodge chalk and to cover our heads and stomachs whenever she approached us with a question. She hadn’t yet punched anyone, but it seemed wise to prepare ourselves against the inevitable.

Though we were forbidden to speak anything but French, the teacher would occasionally use us to practice any of her five fluent languages.

“I hate you,” she said to me one afternoon. Her English was flawless. “I really, really hate you.” Call me sensitive, but I couldn’t help taking it personally.

After being singled out as a lazy kfdtinvfm, I took to spending hours a night on my homework, working even longer whenever we were assigned an essay. I suppose I could have gotten by with less, but I was determined to create some sort of an identity for myself. We’d have one of those “complete the sentence” exercises, and I’d fool with the thing for hours, invariably settling on something like, “A quick run around the lake? I’d love to. Just give me a minute to strap on my wooden leg.” The teacher, through word and action, conveyed the message that, if this was my idea of an identity, she wanted nothing to do with it.

My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of my classroom and accompanied me out onto the wide boulevards. Stopping for coffee, asking directions, depositing money in my bank account: these things were out of the question, as they involved having to speak. Before beginning school, there had been no shutting me up, but now I was convinced that everything I said was wrong. When the phone rang, I ignored it. If someone asked me a question, I pretended to be deaf. I knew my fear was getting the best of me when I started wondering why they don’t sell cuts of meat in vending machines.

My only comfort was the knowledge that I was not alone. Huddled in the smoky hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps.

“Sometimes me cry alone at night.”

“That be common for I also, but be more strong, you. Much work, and someday you talk pretty. People stop hate you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay?”

Unlike other classes I have taken, here there was no sense of competition. When the teacher poked a shy Korean woman in the eyelid with a freshly sharpened pencil, we took no comfort in the fact that, unlike Hyeyoon Cho, we all knew the irregular past tense of the verb “to defeat.” In all fairness, the teacher hadn’t meant to hurt the woman, but neither did she spend much time apologizing, saying only, “Well, you should have been vkkdyo more kdeynfulh.”

Over time, it became impossible to believe that any of us would ever improve. Fall arrived, and it rained every day. It was mid-October when the teacher singled me out, saying, “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” And it struck me that, for the first time since arriving in France, I could understand every word that someone was saying.

Understanding doesn’t mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from it. It’s a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxicating and deceptive. The teacher continued her diatribe, and I settled back, bathing in the subtle beauty of each new curse and insult.

“You exhaust me with your foolishness and reward my efforts with nothing but pain, do you understand me?”

The world opened up, and it was with great joy that I responded, “I know the thing what you speak exact now. Talk me more, plus, please, plus.”

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