Island Of Plenty

I like that in the first chapter, “Argument,” there was a persuasive example. It was about Third World workers, which is often a touchy subject. The way the author put together his argument it helped see what I should do with my argument. This chapter had a good general layout guide that I will use as a reference for my next paper. I like how the chapters are set up in this book, they use paragraphs with bolded titles. It makes it easier to stay on topic, and get the information that is presented to me. We have already been through logical fallacies, so that was a bit tedious. The part called, “Editing for Common Errors in Arguments,” had a lot of common sense errors, that I think most people do repeatedly even after being notified about them, for example, comma mistakes.

If there had been more facts involved in this essay it would have been convincing, but it lacked that facts and I was unable to take the argument seriously. Some of these arguments could be pulled apart; some of the premises are weak, for example, “The future of mankind is at stake.” As a premise, this can be proven false. There was plenty of pathos, such as describing the author’s children and the next generations, but that didn’t make me really take the author seriously. I enjoyed “Empathy: What We Need Now,” it had a good amount of ethos. She seemed qualified to be talking about the subject matter. She also cited Martin Luther King Jr. Jeremy Rifkin, and Dave Eggers. It was longer of an essay compared to the other essays read this week; however the way it was written made it go by fast. The introduction and conclusion were both set apart from the rest of the essay; at first I didn’t like that, but once I finished reading it I realized that that is why the essay went by so