Rhetorical analsis

Rhetorical analsis

Choosing one of the three following essays, write a 1000 word rhetorical analysis that identifies the following rhetorical elements:

Subject
Thesis
Purpose (use Cicero’s definition)
Audience
Persona
Ethos
Authoritative Testimony
Analogy

The essay’s paragraph structure should conform to the following outlined pattern:

1. Introduction (a brief intro the kind of analysis you will be conducting—ie. define rhetorical analysis in your own words)
2. Identify the Subject and Thesis
3. Identify the Purpose (be sure to identify the specifics—to delight, teach, move—and support with quotes and explications of the quotes)
4. Identify the Audience (be sure to support with quotes and explications of the quotes)
5. Identify the Persona (be sure to support with quotes and explications of the quotes)
6. Identify the Ethos (be sure to identify the specifics—knowledge of the subject, common ground etc—and support with quotes and explications of the quotes)
7. Identify the use of Authoritative Testimony (be sure to support with quotes and explications of the quotes)
8. Identify the use of Analogy (be sure to support with quotes and explications of the quotes)
9. Conclusion

FROM THE NY TIMES

From Hunger
By SARAH GERARD

In September 2007, at the age of 22, I jumped from a moving freight train and landed on my face. The train had originated in Worcester, Mass., and was headed west toward Buffalo, but the path leading up to that event had begun six months before, in Long Island, where I was double-majoring in English and secondary education at Hofstra University, interning at a high school, taking two extra classes and dating a guy who liked to self-medicate. Bulimia and anorexia had reduced me to a skeletal 92 pounds, and I’d developed an addiction to diet pills that filled my small off-campus apartment with plastic bottles and bubble-wrapped packages hidden in drawers and crevices where my roommate wouldn’t find them. Every flat surface was home to a stack of celebrity gossip magazines full of articles about beach bodies and diets.

I had a few friends, but they seldom visited me. I rarely slept and would spend long nights anxiously staring into the vacuum of my living room, feeling the walls breathe around me, smoking cigarette after cigarette, searching for the peaceful center of my hunger. The day I finally hit bottom, my mentor at the high school found me crying in the supply closet of the teacher’s lounge with bits of tear-soaked tissue all over my face. I hadn’t slept in days, and had just finished throwing up a lunch of edamame beans and Red Bull. As was my ritual, I followed this purge with two Hydroxycut pills to “burn off” whatever remained in my stomach.
I told my mentor that I had just been given a diagnosis of a thyroid disease, hoping, though he never asked, that it would explain why I was so skinny. I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he gave me permission to leave for the day. I called my father in Florida from the parking lot, crying hysterically, my mouth tasting of metal and stomach acid. Two weeks later, I checked into an inpatient rehab facility in Tampa, where I would spend the next 60 days trying to learn how to eat properly and how to speak candidly about my feelings.

It did not work — at least not right away. Two months after my release, I was still not abstinent. I’d stopped attending my 12-step meetings for “philosophical” reasons and began hanging around with a girl I’d roomed with in treatment who was worse off than I was. I wasn’t starving myself, but we had started shoplifting, and went back to drinking and smoking weed — generally causing trouble all over town. A photograph from that period shows us together at a water park in Tampa. She is much taller and heavier than I am, and I remember thinking when the picture was taken that, standing next to her in a swimsuit, I must have looked so small. I am visibly sucking in my stomach, playing it off as comical, but looking back, I know it wasn’t.
~~~~~
Soon I knew I needed to flee — the self-medicating boyfriend, the life I was living in Florida, everything. I had to be where no one could see or find me.
An old friend introduced me to her cousin — let’s call him Michael — who had issues of his own and was looking to leave town. Desperate to escape, we decided to leave together. Some friends of his had just returned from months of hopping freight trains. Their stories sounded exciting, liberating, exactly what we needed. They told us the nearest hub for freight traffic was Savannah, Ga. From there, we could catch a train north, and then another one west. We could go anywhere we wanted to without documentation. We could live the way we wanted to, free of any rules. We packed our bags with compasses, pocket knives, duct tape, lighter fluid: everything we thought we’d need to survive as members of the squatter punk subculture. Two weeks later, we were on an Amtrak train to Savannah.

Michael and I were out on the road from July to September. I cut off my hair and my sleeves, rubbed holes in my jeans, sewed patches onto my shirts, refused to shower, and gave myself a road name – Ema. But even while hitchhiking and hopping freight trains, my motivation was image-centric: I was more concerned with looking the part of the hobo than being one, and anxious not to be exposed as a fake.
Sitting next to the Allegheny River one night in the rain with a group of hobo kids, one told me I looked like a model. It was meant as an insult, but I took it as a compliment; I was prettier than all the dirty hobos in the gravel pit that night! I dyed my hair purple in the river with another girl and three days later bleached it blonde in New York City in the apartment of a friend who made us shower twice before letting us sleep in his bed. We took a bus to Massachusetts and caught our last train ride out in the middle of the night.

Hunger on a freight train is not the hunger of the anorexic. You know that no one is looking. It is the difference between wanting food and needing it. Michael and I rode on a car with no roof and two narrow strips of sheet metal for a floor. We could see the tracks racing by underneath us. Rain soaked through our clothes and our packs. We ran out of food soon after we left and had no fresh water, and hid beneath the semi truck that shared our car. Pulling into Buffalo some time after dawn, we knew we had to get off. We waited for the train to slow down, but didn’t wait long enough.
My last memory is of the gravel rushing toward me. I woke seven hours later to Michael feeding me ice chips on a gurney in the Buffalo hospital. I was starving, but I wasn’t allowed to eat because my stomach had to be empty when they stitched me back together. I could stick my tongue through a hole where my tooth was knocked out, and my upper lip was split to my nose; my lower lip down to my chin. My left eye was swollen shut, the eggshell-thin bone behind it cracked, causing me to see double for months. It would be days until I could eat solid food again, and I knew then, asking for more ice, that I would never be beautiful like I wanted to be. Like I had striven to be. Like I didn’t want to want to be.
My parents paid for both my stay in rehab and the multiple rounds of surgery I would need to recover. They have never asked me to pay them back, but they did ask me to save a picture they took of me in the hospital, with over 150 stitches running down the middle of my swollen face and inside my mouth, to serve as a reminder of what I shouldn’t choose to live with anymore.
After the accident I returned to Florida a bruised and battered mess, moved back into my old bedroom, and began the slow process of finding a job with little idea of where I should be looking. I knew that I wanted to help people, but I didn’t know what I could offer another person considering the state I was in. Who was I to lead anyone? Finally, I came across an ad in the newspaper seeking temporary in-home support for adults with mental retardation. I applied, and got it. A few weeks later, Michael’s mother suggested that I apply for an assistant teaching position at the school where she worked, in a classroom for third and fourth graders with emotional and behavioral disabilities. Surely, I was qualified. I applied, and got that job, too. I worked seven days a week, five of them at the school. Meanwhile, Michael and I looked for apartments.
Days in the classroom were trying. Half of the students in the school were legally homeless, and it wasn’t unusual for a kid to come to class without basic necessities: notebooks, glasses, paper, even backpacks. While I thought it would be easier to work with younger students, I didn’t anticipate how badly behaved this class would be. The students made frequent jokes about my scar, lied about the rules, threw daily temper tantrums that resulted in overturned furniture, fought with each other and ran away. Because I was new, they tested me relentlessly. I’d leave work exhausted, and on Fridays, drive straight to my other job to work through the weekend. During this period, I drank Red Bull like water. I knew that the Red Bull was part of my addiction, but it was the only thing that kept me awake through the day. I still had relapses, but I was determined to reach a point where I could maintain my abstinence.
Despite all this, for the first time in years, I was happy. I felt, finally, like I belonged somewhere. When I wasn’t working, I was trying to write a novel.
I had decided to be a writer.

Every photograph is a memento mori, an acknowledgment of what Susan Sontag called “time’s relentless melt.” A class picture from that year shows me standing next to a pretty white teacher with a small group of black and Hispanic third and fourth graders, my head turned in such a way that, I had figured out, hid the more awkward angles of my face caused by the scar and the underlying tissue. Around this time, an oral surgeon told me that, if I kept throwing up my food, he would refuse to perform the several rounds of surgery I needed to replace the bone I had shattered in my upper jaw, and the gum that had started to recede around it, which was needed to anchor the implant that would replace the tooth I had lost.

At the risk of stating the too obvious, an eating disorder is inherently narcissistic. As if looking at a photograph, one has to enjoy climbing outside of herself to see herself as she believes others see her, then commit to fixing what’s imperfect. Without the admiration of others, her pain loses purpose; while rooted in the delusion of control, her addiction is exposed as something very much out of control; obsessive; devoid of reason or justification. The students in my classroom didn’t notice when I was hungry, didn’t care when I was tired, cared even less that I was thin. The disabled adults with whom I lived on the weekends, if they could even talk, would tell me that I was pretty no matter how I looked, because to them, I was.
Gradually, what remained of my eating disorder stopped working the way I wanted it to; it began to feel silly. Like a waste of time that, since the train accident, suddenly seemed all too precious. When I was working seven days a week, my eating disorder began to feel like a third job that I didn’t have the energy to perform. Meanwhile, I had found goals that were far more important than being thin.
After a year of living together in an apartment infested with termites where hobo friends came to sleep on our couch and share stories about their ramblings — where I had written what I thought was a novel about what little I knew about train hopping — Michael and I broke up. He was going back on the road, but I had experienced enough hardship and would not be joining him. In the year and a half that had passed since the accident, I came to realize that traveling, to me, had been a form of running away from myself. I couldn’t decide which road to take, so I didn’t decide and, instead, just took any. I wasn’t ready to do the work I needed to be a whole person, and there had been nothing in Florida to keep me there – no life to speak of, at that time.
But I had since learned that becoming whole was a gradual process, and that finding something to keep me there was my own responsibility. I still wasn’t completely abstinent; I had starved myself for several days before cheating on Michael with our neighbor, a fact I’m not proud of. But I was closer than I had been in years, and would continue to get better. I was going to be a writer, and writing was more important than being beautiful.
Rather, I found, being beautiful was writing.
Sarah Gerard is a writer and bookseller at McNally Jackson Books in New York. Her fiction and criticism has appeared in several publications, including in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, New South, Slice and Word Riot.

Not Just Tiger’s Temptations
By DOUG GLANVILLE

No one would have accused me of having multiple ladies on each arm when I was in high school or college. I was a diligent student, kind of nerdy, the son of a teacher, and as interested in baseball and computers as I was in girls. Still, I was told I had potential in the social department, if I applied myself.
But something magical happened before I had to do much work. I signed a professional baseball contract as a junior in college and went away to my first spring training as a member of the Chicago Cubs organization.
I remember returning to campus and, after appearing on a closed-circuit cable show to discuss my new career, having the attractive hostess offer to walk me home. Wow, that never happened before. Apparently, I had skipped a few of the steps to social acceptance, and before I knew it, “unapproachable” and “woman” were no longer being used in the same sentence.??So what actually did happen?
Even once you enter the professional ranks, there is plenty to worry about. A baseball player on draft day is still miles away from the big leagues.
Soon after being drafted, I realized something profound: a lot of the work required to make it takes place off the field, and involves how you manage your life. I witnessed a few of my minor league counterparts blow their opportunities in part because they were trying to live the life before they had the life, burning the candle at both ends every night. If it wasn’t for Phoenix’s early club curfew, there’s no telling when players would have come home.
Because I had a few shells to bust out of, I put my toe in that party water, too. I was just 20 when I was drafted and it didn’t take long to understand that a new kind of woman was interested in me: the sort of woman who in the past had stirred my insecurity. It was like a kid finding Batman’s belt in the lost and found. No point in giving it back until you’ve tried all your new powers. But we forget to ask, will I be able to stop once I’ve tasted these powers?
Superficially, the new bar for women was set based on the physical: some sort of exterior beauty, along with fame, sophistication, wild-child possibility, flirtation with the dark side — all qualities and places I could hardly fathom until I entered the world of a pro athlete.
It didn’t help that minor league players in spring training are in the same venues as the big leaguers. When the day’s training was over, the places to hang out were frequented by all levels of players, and even coaches.
As you climb the baseball ladder, your social confidence explodes. You receive the sort of attention you never did as an acne-ridden honors student. Quite frankly, it is addictive, and when you are in it, there seems to be no end in sight.
But it isn’t rooted in good practices; it’s more like, “flash your badge and they will come.” Your confidence is based on a pack mentality, strong in numbers. You can push aside the inconvenience of having to start a conversation — just by being in the V.I.P. section and offering tickets to the next day’s game, the conversation is started for you. If you have a well-connected agent or an entourage to find you a companion, you might not need conversation at all. At the very least, your newly acquired wealth can keep the drinks flowing to the point where you don’t feel like you’re trying to ask your first-grade crush, Michele Soleimani, to borrow her pencil.
The above dynamic grows exponentially, and before you can blink, your bad relationship habits are written all over the contact list on your cell phone.
So where can you end up?
Tiger Woods country.
In an athlete’s environment, money can be its own pollutant; you can become desensitized to the significance of what it can buy. Typically, if a person spends hundreds of dollars on arrangements to pass time with someone, that someone would be important in his life. But when you have extensive financial resources, it’s easy to send similar signals to people who are meaningful only for a moment. Even worse, you might only concern yourself with what it means to you. As the money flows in, so do the toys — cars, clothes, bling — and once in the stratosphere, a la Tiger, it is amazing how easy it is, if you are not careful and grounded, to start seeing women as another accessory in your life.
The pro athlete’s world is self-centered at best. Schedule is fixed, practice a must, travel a given. Anyone choosing to share that has to get on board and fit in. It can get to a point where the relationship is strictly one-way (the athlete’s way), and the other party becomes insignificant, more a prop than a true relationship partner.
If the player dares to take the next step — marriage — there will likely be a legal team at his disposal (via his agent) that can set up a prenuptial agreement. This negotiation is often dragged out for months as a way of seeing whether the future spouse shows an ugly side during the process. But it’s a red flag for your relationship if you have to resort to such tactics to force the worst in someone, and the prenup becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, set up not just to distribute assets but to deal with an inevitable break-up or philandering. In fact, it might as well be seen as a pre-meditated agreement (I may do all of this dirt, so when I do and you want to leave, I still win because instead of half you only get a check for X dollars and one house).
Reducing a marriage to time, money and X is usually a bad way to start. But in the athletes’ world, relationships can get crafted around their whims. The spiritual significance of an enduring commitment falls by the wayside, giving way to parameters and rules defined by the ego of the player, and maybe his legal and PR team. Although it doesn’t have to be this way, relationships can become part of the world of glitz and illusions.
With that kind of unstable foundation, it’s easy to see how someone like Tiger Woods could see his world come crashing down simply because he hit a fire hydrant.
Tiger Woods has been transformational for the game of golf in so many ways. That is indisputable. But he has proven to be just like every other figure who fell for the little guy with the pitchfork on his shoulder telling him, “It’s all good, no one will know, you can get away with it.” But that little guy on his shoulder didn’t tell him that in the real world, you don’t get away with it because even when you are the only one who knows, that is enough to destroy you. It just will happen from the inside out.

A Syrian Refugee’s? Message to the? European Union
We fled war to find safety with our families. Why? is the E.U. making our lives more miserable?

IDOMENI, Greece — WHEN we first got here we had money to buy a little food. Now it’s gone. We stand in line for hours for a sandwich. My husband told a journalist recently: “People are fed up. Maybe tomorrow they will break down the gate and flood across the border.” The journalist said, “How many weapons do you have?” If we knew how to carry weapons or wanted to carry weapons we would not have fled Syria. We want peace. We are sick of killing.
We fled a war, and now the European Union is making war against us, a psychological war. When we hear rumors that we’ll be let into Europe, we celebrate. These leaders give us new hope, then they extinguish it. Why did you open the door to refugees? Why did you welcome people? If they had stopped it before, we would not have come. We would not have risked death, me and my children, and thousands of others, to make the crossing.
I’m 39 and Kurdish, from the city of Hasakah. I knew from watching the news that Hasakah was under threat from the Islamic State. Every day last spring, the government would shell the city’s outskirts. Sometimes a stray shell would land near us.

One day, at 5 in the morning, we heard the shelling and we knew that the Islamic State had arrived. I took my children and two bags and fled. In those days, everyone had two bags ready at all times: one containing important documents and the other clothes and other essentials. We ran through a dry riverbed. It was still muddy and we sank in up to our ankles.
Even before the Islamic State came, life under the Kurdish forces was very hard. There was no wood to burn. Once I asked my husband, “If we took out one of the roof beams to put on the stove, and left one, do you think the roof would fall?” He laughed. “Yes,” he said. “It would fall, and we’d be living in the street on top of everything.”
If you have a son in Hasakah today he has to go to war. It doesn’t matter if he’s your only son or if he’s studying. If there’s no boy, a girl has to go. Someone from every house has to fight if you want to stay in the area. The Kurdish forces tried to conscript my daughter. I had to smuggle her out to Turkey.

Most of my family is in Germany, and so we decided to go there. We spent two months in a border area before fleeing to Turkey, where my husband was working. We found a smuggler through Facebook — a relative by marriage — and flew to Izmir. Two days later, we stood in the dark with 35 others somewhere on the Turkish coast.
We were the last people on the beach, my daughter, her husband, their baby and me. My daughter was sobbing. She said she didn’t want to go and that if she died, the guilt was around my neck. I didn’t know what to do. Then, like a dream, a young man came and lifted her and the baby into the boat. It was just me on the shore. I waded out to the boat. The smugglers lifted me from below, and my nephew pulled me up.
The day we arrived here in Idomeni people were still crossing the border into Macedonia. We thought we had arrived. We thought the hard part was the sea.
There is a saying in Arabic: “Even heaven, without people, is unbearable.”
I have three sisters and three brothers in Germany. The European Union wants to keep us divided between countries. If we sign up for the relocation program and the European Union assigns us a European country and we get that citizenship, will we be able to go to our family in Germany? I’m afraid they will change the laws and we won’t be able to go even then.
In our own country we refused to be separated. Are we going to agree here? Everyone in Idomeni just wants to go to their families; otherwise they would not have undertaken this dangerous journey to be reunited with them. In the next tent, there are two women who haven’t seen their husbands in two years. The men are in Germany and haven’t been able to bring their wives and children.

I want all the leaders in Europe to hear me: If any one of them agrees to be separated from his son, I agree to do the same. Or his brother, or his sister, or his cousin.

If they want to do this to us, let them give us back what we lost to come here, and send us back to Syria. If I wanted to live among strangers I would have applied to go to Canada. If you’re sick, who will help you? You need your brother, your sister, your mother, your father.
Laila is a licensed hairdresser. She asked that her surname be withheld because she fears telling her story could endanger her family in Syria or affect her asylum claim. As told to Laura Dean, a journalist based in Cairo.