In Defense Of Lowering The Voting Age Rhetorical Analysis

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Did you know over 60% of teens work in the state of South Dakota? South Dakota Workforce: Of that 60%, nearly all of them are taxed and none of them have the right to vote. This is a clear example of taxation without representation: one of the unjust ideals that America strives to stray from. In his essay, “In Defense of Lowering the Voting Age,” Joshua A. Douglas craftily demonstrates the need for sixteen-year-olds’ votes to establish a fair representation in the municipal world through his use of logos, ethos, and pathos. Although Douglas’s use of pathos is sparse, it is impactful because it helps the reader to connect to the text through their emotions. One of the first instances of this pathos is on page five when Douglas writes, “Turning …show more content…

Another example of this occurs on page 6 when he says, “Unless there is a competency-based reason to bar them from voting, then, it seems only fair that we permit sixteen— and seventeen-year-olds to participate in our democratic process.” With this piece of text, Douglas again makes the audience question themselves by providing a time and place in which sixteen and seventeen-year-olds should be barred from voting. As a result of the ethos’s ability to make the reader question their morals, it strengthens the author’s credibility and ultimately remains one of the most important literary devices Douglas uses. Douglas’s implication of logos remains the most impactful literary device in his essay because of his ability to emphasize discrimination while also reaching an audience with a multitude of backgrounds. The first example of logos happens when Douglas cites a municipal election in the U.S. Census Bureau from 2013. It illustrated that the turnout rate between sixteen and seventeen-year-olds was forty-four percent while the turnout rate from the total population was eleven percent (p.

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