Due next time: Response 5
This is not a rhetorical analysis.
Which means, you shouldn’t have one paragraph devoted to ethos, another to pathos, and another to logos. Rather, these appeals are more like aspects of your argument that should be sustained throughout the paper, holistically. Correlatively, you don’t need to use these terms explicitly: you should just “do” them or “embody” them.
Don’t commit the “straw man” fallacy.
The “straw man” is a particular type of logical fallacy. According to our textbook, “a straw man argument is a diversionary tactic that sets up another’s position in a way that can be easily rejected” (57). In other words, if a particular counterargument is too difficult or too complex to respond to in an easy or simple way, we sometimes create an oversimplified or otherwise distorted version of that counterargument–a version that’s easier to rebut.
The problem is that you’re being unfair to the opposing viewpoint, since you’re giving the reader a less than accurate version of it. Moreover, by dumbing down your counterarguments, you’re effectively dumbing down your own paper; you’re preventing your own argument from developing and growing stronger.
How do we prevent this? By actually citing and quoting from a source every time we raise a counterargument.
Another point: target audience(s).
Make sure your clear about who your target audience is. To whom does your argument matter? If your paper doesn’t answer this question yet, a good place to do it is in the concluding paragraph. Indeed, specifying the target audience is in many ways the perfect job for a concluding paragraph. A good strategy for doing this in your concluding paragraph would be to be extremely straightforward, using some variation on the following:
(Pretend, for example, that I’ve written a paper arguing that daily use of smart phones and other social media-equipped technologies is bad for children’s psychological and social development.)
To conclude, allow me to address an important question that I have yet to address head-on: to whom does this topic matter? As I see it, the issues discussed in this paper have the most immediate consequences for two audiences in particular. The first is parents. Given the numerous negative effects that social media use has on the adolescent brain, parents should find ways to limit the time that their children spend using such technologies. A second audience that has a stake in this topic is public school administrators. Given that most parents can’t monitor their children’s activity 24/7, part of the burden falls upon school administrators to more effectively crack down on social media use during school hours.
Rhetoric & Writing I 