Allen Stein's Adults Should Read Adult Books?

Recently publishing companies have focused efforts to release books that are intended for the large teenage audiences. However these books have unintentionally become popular with adult readers who have been drawn into these book franchises, such as The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, and Twilight. The argument within the article, Adults Should Read Adult Books, focuses on the growing number of adults reading young adult fiction and the consequences of this trend. While many people would argue that the genre of a book should not dictate readership, the author of the article, Joel Stein disagrees. In his article, Stein argues that adults should be ashamed for reading a YA book. Additionally, he argues in for adult reader to gain knowledge from a

One of the most popular classical appeals of rhetoric is pathos, which involves the use of emotion to manipulate a reaction from the audience. Stein uses pathos within his article to convince readers to agree with his argument. Pathos is first used when Stein compares an adult male watching pornography to an adult male reading a young adult book. In modern society, pornography is a taboo subject that is shameful for one to admit to watching. Through the comparison of an adult watching pornography and an adult reading young adult book, the reader is required to associate the negative view of pornography with adults reading YA books. This use of pathos uses the readers’ previous views on pornography and manipulates it to support the argument of the

While proper use of rhetoric would result in the author using logos or logic to support his arguments; the article uses logical fallacies instead of logic to support the argument. Logical fallacies are flaws of reasoning used to intentionally disguise lack of reason. One type of logical fallacy seen within the article is genetic. The genetic logical fallacy is when one judges something as good or bad based on where or whom it came from. In the article Stein judges the work within the young adult books to be bad for adults to read since the material would come off the YA shelf instead of the adult shelf of the bookstore. Since the article contains no proof that writing within young adult books are less than the writing within adult books, the author attacks that the writing is within a book labelled for young adults. The use of the logical fallacy of genetic prevents the article from supporting the argument of the article with