Rhetoric is the art of using language to communicate effectively and persuasively. Authors often use rhetoric to convey a message to their audience via the three rhetorical appeals: ethos, pathos, and logos. Serving in Florida is an essay written by Barbara Ehrenreich that is a first-hand experience by the author in the world of working minimum age jobs. The author tried to balance two low paying jobs in order to make ends meet. This paper will discuss how Ehrenreich mainly uses pathos, or the emotional appeal, in her essay to persuade young adults to go to college and strive for high paying jobs.
Author Barbara Ehrenreich uses ethos, the ethical appeal as the secondary rhetorical appeal in her essay to convince her readers that she is indeed a credible author. The rhetorical situation in a rhetorical essay focuses mainly on three things: the audience, the author’s purpose, and the context of the text. Firstly, the audience of Serving in Florida will be evaluated. Teenagers and young adults are the two main age groups of Ehrenreich’s intended audience. That specific age group faces many challenges from whether or not to graduate high school to whether or not to go to college.
Ehrenreich chose this audience because persons belonging to this age group are old enough to understand the consequences of their life choice. In contrast, persons of this age group are still young enough to make naive mistakes. This directs the attention toward the author’s purpose. The second ingredient of a rhetorical situation is the author’s purpose. Ehrenreich’s purpose in her research and writing is to effectively persuade young adults to go to college and strive for more then minimum wage in their lives.
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Her essay is based on her personal experience while working undercover in low paying jobs in Florida. The author endured this “experience” in order to get a better understanding of the topic and to connect with her readers in a more effective, truthful way. Ehrenreich’s main goal in writing her essay is to inform readers that life is hard for a low paid working class American. In addition, the author’s purpose is to persuade young adults that settling for a minimum wage job is not their only option, and that everyone has the opportunity to succeed in society.
This leads to the third and final aspect of the rhetorical situation: context. A social context revolves around Ehrenreich’s essay. The author shows that with low paying jobs, it is hard for one to provide for oneself. There are three main rhetorical appeals: ethical, emotional, and logical. The three are commonly referred to as ethos, pathos, and logos. Ehrenreich’s essay Serving in Florida highlights one primary rhetorical appeal: pathos, and one secondary rhetorical appeal: ethos. The primary rhetorical appeal chosen by Ehrenreich, pathos, focuses mainly on the audience.
The emotional appeal of any work appeals to the audience’s emotions using one or more emotional strategies. In Serving in Florida, Ehrenreich appealed to her audience’s emotions using four main strategies that will be discussed later. Authors use pathos to reach their audience on a deeper, more personal level. Ehrenreich’s secondary rhetorical appeal highlighted in Serving in Florida is ethos, the ethical appeal. Ethos focuses mainly on the author. This appeal studies an author’s credibility, knowledge, character, and confidence.
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When used correctly, ethos will assist an author in making his or her audience feel the same as he or she. Because Ehrenreich experienced life working minimum wage jobs, her credibility in writing this essay is indisputable. She paints a realistic picture of what life working more than one low paying job is really like, and her readers can feel the emotion pouring out of the essay. Ehrenreich presents herself in a good way meaning that she is not narrow-minded on the subject of poverty because she experienced it herself. Research prevents an author from being a biased source of knowledge.
Ehrenreich easily appeals to her audience because she is confident in her writing. Her experience provides reason for her audience to be as confident in her writing as she is. Like previously stated, the author of Serving in Florida uses three of the many emotional strategies to appeal to her audience’s emotions. They include narration, personal experience, and empathy. There are many strategies that Ehrenreich could have used, but she chose these three because they are the most helpful in appealing to the audience’s emotion. Firstly, Ehrenreich utilizes the advantages of narration.
She narrates her experiences and vividly describes what she endured during her undercover research. The first person point of view that she uses assists her in delivering her message to young adults with a more credible sense. Narration is a good vehicle for conveying an author’s understandings to his or her readers. The second strategy Ehrenreich uses to appeal to her audience’s emotions is personal experience. Her use of personal experience not only provides credibility, but it helps the reader relate more to the message provided by the essay.
The author of Serving in Florida witnessed first-hand what it is like to work more than one minimum wage job trying to make ends meet, and her experience is what convinces an audience of the truth of her claims. In addition, with the use of Ehrenreich’s personal experience, her audience is more likely to feel the same pain that she felt during her investigations. This leads to Ehrenreich’s third strategy. In addition to narration and personal experience, author Ehrenreich uses empathy to also appeal to her audience’s emotions.
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The author can easily gain an audience’s sympathy in describing the struggles she faced during her research. Ehrenreich explains the difficulty of accomplishing everyday tasks like buying a decent meal or a new uniform. Young adults can relate to this because most college and high school students do face the same struggles of being on a limited income, whether it is because they work only part-time or rely on their parents for financial support. Either way, readers feel the struggles that Ehrenreich faced, and thus sympathize with her.
In using these three main strategies to appeal to her audience’s emotions, Ehrenreich has succeeded in conveying her message in a way that her audience can relate to. In conclusion, author Barbara Ehrenreich appeals to her audience by using a primary and secondary rhetorical appeal. The primary appeal, pathos, or the emotional appeal, reaches the audience on an emotional level, helping them relate to Ehrenreich and the struggles she faced during her research. The author used three emotional strategies to assist her in doing so.
They include: narration, personal experience, and empathy. The secondary appeal used by Ehrenreich is ethos, the ethical appeal. This appeal focuses mainly on the author’s credibility and character. It is obvious that Ehrenreich is credible because her facts were obtained via personal experience. She is confident her in writing, therefore her readers will feel the same way. Ehrenreich effectively utilizes two rhetorical appeals in her essay Serving in Florida to persuade and appeal to her audience.
