A Word And My Family's Battle Rhetorical Argument

In “A Movie, A Word, and My Family’s Battle,” by Patricia Bauer makes an emotional argument that you cannot use the word “retard”, no matter how you mean it, without offending a large group of people while also setting back years of progress.
Patricia Bauer was a former Washington post reporter and one of the founders of the UCLA, a school for young adults with intellectual disabilities, although she gains most of her knowledge on the topic from raising a daughter with Down Syndrome. This article was originally published in The Washington Post, one of the most circulates newspapers in America. When this article came out in August of 2008, two major things were happening concerning mental disabled people. The first was a movie that came out

Retard,’ we heard her say, and Margaret wilted” (118). This shows that she has been in situations where the word “retard” affected a person with mental disabilities, in this case her own daughter. To the reader this goes straight to their heart, making them feel bad for everything they have ever used the word “retard”. Later in the argument she show the word not only affects her daughter, but also anyone that cares about her daughter. She says, “For my daughter and my family, it’s more like a grenade, and we’re the collateral damage”. This explains that whenever the word “retard” is used, it’s not only hurts people with mental disabilities but also anyone that cares about people with mental disabilities. Then she goes into how she understands that people, usually aren’t trying to be rude or hurtful, that they are “just joking” or “didn’t mean it like that” but regardless of how it’s meant, it’s still hurtful to the people who are affected by mental disabilities on a daily basis. Falling back on to pathos again, she names of a handful of ways she’s heard “retard” in her day to day life. She says, “A clerk in a store apologizes for being ‘such a retard’... Ouch. Kids at the mall call one another ‘you big retard.’ Ouch. A friend tells a … story…about her recent fender bender, with a punchline about ‘some

She uses an extreme amount of pathos to show how much it can personally effect people by using the word “retard”. She also uses the personal experience as a way to show her credibility on this particular subject. Although she does use an extreme amount of pathos, she doesn’t solely rely on it, she also uses ethos to show she knows what she’s talking about. Overall this is a very strong article, and with her extreme use of pathos you can clearly see how the word “retard” not only affects her family, but any family that is connected to mental