On Being A Cripple Rhetorical Analysis

579 Words2 Pages

Authors use rhetorical strategies to express themes in their writing. Different rhetorical strategies help convey different themes with varying degrees of effectiveness. One way to measure the effectiveness is to rhetorical analyze two pieces of writing to each other and see which is best.
Take Nancy Mairs and James Baldwin for instance. Mairs’s On Being a Cripple seems very different from Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son from a distance. Only when you begin to rhetorically analyze the texts do you see where the two compare and contrast.
Using the soapstone method it is easy to compare and contrast the authors. Both essays were written at a high school and beyond level, Mairs has aimed hers more to the women that read magazines while Baldwin …show more content…

He eventually became his father in the sense of his attitude toward society. It is obvious Baldwin has a negative view of society and is against how society treats people who are not part of the majority. Another way to look at the similarities and differences of Mairs and Baldwin is to look at the way they use ethos, pathos, and logos in their essays. Ethos, pathos, and logos are rhetorical strategies that use an appeal to credibility, emotion, and logic. Both authors have a good amount of ethos because Mairs lives with Multiple Sclerosis and Baldwin lived during the Jim Crow Era. Mairs presents her medical profile and Baldwin talks about growing up in the Jim Crow Era, giving them both logos.
The interesting part is pathos. Pathos is the most powerful of the three and many authors rely on it most. To appeal to pathos they use similar and different strategies. Mairs uses humour and anecdotal evidence. Baldwin also uses anecdotal evidence, but nothing else. This is something you don’t have too deep into to understand. It is very obvious from Baldwin’s tone throughout the essay that he has a more negative view on society and how racism is during that time period. Mairs keeps her essay more light and positive with humor while Baldwin doesn’t try to cover up how things were with

Open Document