http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/opinion/blow-americas-exploding-pipe-dream.html?ref=columnists
I really liked this Op-Ed piece. It is blunt and straight to the point. It doesn’t dance around the issue at all. The author, Charles M. Blow, writes about how the United States is on a preventable decline that most people are just unwilling to step up and stop. He says we are allowing our country to lose its position of prominence in the world because we are making poor decisions and are still suffering under the delusion that we are the best country in the world, and that because of this we are not doing much if anything to uphold our position in the future.
He uses several rhetorical strategies in his essay. Logos, ethos, and pathos are all used to describe the poor shape our country is falling into. Logos is shown in the statistics comparing us to other countries, ethos is shown in the descriptions of how the rich unfairly and unethically hoard their wealth and buy off the government with it, and pathos is used with examples of the increasing poverty in the U.S. Blow also uses anaphora throughout the first half of his essay. Almost every sentence starts with “We…” emphasizing how everyone has played a part in letting this decline happen. He is also cynical at times, especially when talking about the rich and their part in this downward spiral.
I really liked this Op-Ed piece. It is blunt and straight to the point. It doesn’t dance around the issue at all. The author, Charles M. Blow, writes about how the United States is on a preventable decline that most people are just unwilling to step up and stop. He says we are allowing our country to lose its position of prominence in the world because we are making poor decisions and are still suffering under the delusion that we are the best country in the world, and that because of this we are not doing much if anything to uphold our position in the future.
He uses several rhetorical strategies in his essay. Logos, ethos, and pathos are all used to describe the poor shape our country is falling into. Logos is shown in the statistics comparing us to other countries, ethos is shown in the descriptions of how the rich unfairly and unethically hoard their wealth and buy off the government with it, and pathos is used with examples of the increasing poverty in the U.S. Blow also uses anaphora throughout the first half of his essay. Almost every sentence starts with “We…” emphasizing how everyone has played a part in letting this decline happen. He is also cynical at times, especially when talking about the rich and their part in this downward spiral.
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