Nicholas Kristof's Essay 'Is A Hard Life Inherited'

Nicholas Kristof says it best “many are oblivious of their own advantages, and of other people’s disadvantages. The result is a mean-spiritedness in the political world or, at best, a lack of empathy toward those struggling”. A Harvard graduate and human rights activists Nicholas Kristof is an acclaimed author that single-handedly rewrote opinion journalism in today's media. In addition, Kristof had an accentuation on social injustices and produced a multitude of articles and columns about global health, poverty, and gender issues. In his article “Is a Hard Life Inherited” Kristof exudes a controversial concept that has proposed a compelling argument for the most elite within society. The top one percent, the politicians, the decision makers, they are all confronted by Kristoff in his article with a combination of writing strategies that he implements. Furthermore, Kristof executes numerous effective writing strategies that can be broken down into three main components: Pathos, Logos, and

Correspondingly, Kristoff implements the use of Pathos in the passage through a series of complex and vivid hardships that his fellow peer, Rick Goff, encounters. Kristof writes in the passage “His three siblings and he were raised by a grandmother, but money was tight. The children held jobs, churned the family cow’s milk into butter, and survived on what they could hunt and fish, without much regard for laws against poaching”. The privation that Goff is faced with presents itself to the audience in a manner of despondency and despair and allows for the audience to feel a sense of remorse and guilt for the repugnant lifestyle in which Goff lived. The utilization of Pathos is quite evident within the passage and allows one to look through the scope of poverty and hardship with the literary strategies that Kristof