A Priceless Lesson In Humility Rhetorical Analysis

Reading essays from NPR’s This I Believe series, I found that many of these essays would be acceptable for students to use as an example in there essays. Among these essays there was an essay that caught my attention that can fully help students understand what goes into writing a strong essay. It was an essay which teaches the author a lesson in humility. “A Priceless Lesson In Humility” by Felipe Morales is an exemplary example for English 1301 students to read as it shows a variety of writing techniques that can help students improve their writing. For example by reading Morales’s essay, it shows how he uses writing techniques to help develop a strong essay which students can learn from reading his composition. By reading this essay, English

His essay demonstrates dashes to emphasize material at the end of his sentence. The dashes that he uses in his essay for example, “I also saw a lot of our fellow citizens on the street — unfortunate ones, like panhandlers and homeless folks ” creates a greater effect so that the reader should pay more attention to his material. He creates this so that the reader can focus more to the certain sentence to focus on what he’s trying to say. Students will notice that Morales knows how to use dashes “to make a separation stronger than a comma, less formal than a colon, and more relaxed than parenthesis” ( ). Morales also uses dashes to explain why he acted with prejudice, “I acted with prejudice — I judged another person simply for what I assumed she had to be” ( ). The dash that he uses in this sentence makes it have a greater effect to emphasize his realization and explaining why he had acted with prejudice. Finally in the middle of his essay, he demonstrates a dash for the reader can give his sentence a pause to emphasize that it relates to what the reader has just read in an interesting way: “I remember a time, at age 17—I was a busboy, and I heard a father tell his little boy that if he did not do well in school, he would end up like me”. After giving these examples that Morales uses in his essay, students will have a better understanding in how to use dashes to make there writing have greater effect