Sunday, April 7, 2013

Reflection on Essay #2


When I reflect on my essay “The Black Beast That Lies Within Us All,” the one main difference I notice between my first and final draft was the fact that I legitimately couldn’t differentiate between ethos, pathos and logos rhetoric examples. I’m not going to lie, but I’d been struggling with figuring out which one was which when going over Andrew Sullivan’s, “What’s So Bad About Hate?” I read this great piece of writing over again (three times), and it finally became clear to me that he mainly was using logos and ethos appeal to win the audience over. This helped me immensely in putting the pieces of my essay together. I feel as though when I added another paragraph explaining his logos appeal usage to my critique, it strengthened my thesis in which I stated that hate crime laws are not ultimately effective.

            I also recognized, after reading over Sullivan’s article again, that there was not as much pathos driven rhetoric as I thought beforehand. Although this stood out to me the most, as in his opening statement about Byrd’s violent death; it did not embody all the strength of his argument. So with this, I decided to not focus on this as much and to lean towards using his examples of ethos derived appeal more when discussing Sullivan’s piece.

            In closing, writing the first draft helped me to put together a (hopefully) grand rhetoric on “What’s So Bad About Hate?” I thoroughly enjoyed reading Sullivan’s work and learned a great deal about understanding ethos, pathos and logos better through my writing my critique. It was inspiring as a novice writer to finish the final draft after revising the first, and I can only hope I improved on what I needed to accomplish.

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