Analysis Of Learning To Read By Malcolm X

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“The future belongs to people who belong for it today”(Malcolm X). In the article, “Learning to Read” by Malcolm X, and he talks about his adventures while in prison. Malcolm X was a hustler that was sentenced to seven years in prison for robbery in 1946. While in prison he tried to find different ways to give himself an education. Malcolm X goes on to further talk about what he went through while out of prison. He also explains what he learned and how it helped him later on in life while working with Elijah Muhammad who was the leader of the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X uses Ethos and Pathos to describe his way of educating himself as well as using strong word choice, good syntax, and good organization. In his article, Malcolm describes the way he spent seven years in prison and uses his time to give himself an education. He gets a dictionary and starts to read it over and over to study the words …show more content…

Malcolm X stumbled upon some of his letters that put the idea in his head to give himself a homemade education. As he tried he became frustrated because he could not express what he wanted to convey what was in the letters. Malcolm X states, “I had been the most articulate hustler out there...But now, trying to write simple English, I not only wasn’t articulate, I wasn’t even functional”(X 189). Malcolm uses ethos in this quote by showing his credibility and by associating himself into the quote. He explains that even though he was a big hustler on the streets, simple english did not make any sense to him. He even stated that he was not functional because nothing made sense to him. He tried many different things to help him understand what the world was and what he could never understand before. Now that we have seen how Malcolm incorporated Ethos, let us see how he used Pathos to describe his

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