Persuasive Essay On Rhetoric

1261 Words3 Pages

Start with a general statement, a thesis statement, and a structure statement for the introduction. For each of the three body paragraphs, add an introduction, a quote, analyze the quote for a sentence or two, do the same for another quote, and then hit enter and repeat. Finish with closing paragraph summarizing your main points and thesis, and then end it with some pseudo-philosophical sentence about how the BS you just wrote might somehow apply to actual problems in the real world. That was how I was taught to write essays from the seventh to the twelfth grade. It’s really amazing how six years of writing the same five paragraph essay while swapping out the nouns in order to fit a certain text might lead to a student having a somewhat narrow …show more content…

It was an essay about how the liberal social justice movement is fighting to limit the students’ rights to free speech on college campuses. I started my analysis by identifying an example of pathos, where Jacobson tries to pull on right-leaning readers’ disillusionment with liberal ideals. It was important for me to start with this because it happens very on and affects the rest of his argument by putting his readers into a certain mindset. Shortly after, I had a paragraph about how he uses an ethos argument to make him seem like more of an authority on the subject. However, the effectiveness of this ethos argument was partially reliant on the pathos argument that preceded it in Jacobson’s essay. And this ethos argument also made him appear more convincing to the reader, which makes his logos arguments later on more …show more content…

Every essay was a struggle to morph your topic into something that could fit its guidelines. That is what high school writing is. College writing is different because they don’t care about structure, they care about quality. It is up to you to find a structure that works for your topic. In high school, writing was a technical skill about mastering a single structure and learning what you needed to do to get good marks in that. High school writing was a test of how well you could write the five paragraph essay. College writing is a test of how well you can write. This means you need to be able to build from the ground up without a groundwork like the five paragraph essay, and to do this you need to creativity, a skill that wasn’t tested in high school writing nearly as much as it is in college writing. The five paragraph essay teaches you to end every essay with a take away about how what was talked about can be somehow applied to the real world. This is not something every essay should have, but this one definitely has something you should take away. When in college writing, do not lean solely on technical skills. You have to be creative too. Think through and problem solve how to best get your point across. If you can’t learn to do this, you will

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