Comparing The Works Of Andre Dubus And Harriet Mcbryde Johnson

Disability is an topic that has produced conflict, and is viewed very differently from either side. For able-bodied people to truly understand what disabled people go through they need to see disabled people more; see their lives. If seeing disabled people more often became reality, they would be viewed as normal more, and it would make interacting easier for both sides. Disabled people have a hard life, but it does not mean it is not worth living. Nancy Mairs, Andre Dubus, and Harriet McBryde Johnson all have physical disabilities, and have written about their experiences and views. In their writings, they touch upon both similar and different points. A very present similarity between the authors is they all play to the same audience. In

His purpose is to show what it is like to be disabled, and see the way people treat you as a disabled person. He isn’t exactly overjoyed to have become disabled so abruptly, and it seems he has a desire to express the frustrations that come with being disabled. To get this across, Dubus establishes credibility, and more importantly, a connection with the audience. In one paragraph, he writes, “When I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I had a friend in a wheelchair.” He switches between his experience with disability as an able-bodied person and then as a disabled person. The effect this has on the reader is it shows he was just like the reader once, but now he is disabled. It creates a certain level of trust with the reader, because they know he used to be exactly like them. Dubus mostly relies on emotional appeals to make his claims. Because the tone of his writing is somewhat angry, you can tell he is writing through his emotion. He writes, “I wanted to yell at someone, wanted above all to put someone in a wheelchair for one long pushing, pulling, muscle-aching, mind-absorbing day.” This kind of emotion and tone was present throughout his entire piece. In it, one specific structure characteristic stands out. He makes the choice to switch between experiences before he became disabled, and how he is now disabled. This structure choice is part

She writes to persuade the reader that most people are in a way, ignorant towards disabilities, and automatically make the assumption that they aren’t happy. A big point she pushes is that those who are “ignorant” of disability just can’t conceive that disabled people could be happy, or could enjoy life. She experiences this with Peter Singer. She writes, “To Singer, it’s pretty simple: disability makes a person “worse off.” For him it isn’t even a question of the individual, it is just the way it works, and part of her purpose for writing this is to prove him wrong, to convey that they can live a perfectly happy life. She also uses persuasion to convince the reader that disabled children should not be killed. She writes, “We shouldn’t offer assistance with suicide until we all have the assistance we need to get out of bed in the morning and live a good life.” She is arguing that assisted suicide should not be offered to disabled people until they have the assistance that can let them live a good life. The way she gets these points across is through the personal experience tactic, which establishes credibility with the reader. She focuses almost her entire piece on her experience with Peter Singer, an professor advocate of assisted suicide for the disabled, and it is