Barbara Ehrenreich conducts an experience about people in poverty. Barbara could not imagine how these people survive off $6-$7 per hour paying jobs. She wonders how anyone could survive off a low wage job. Her main focus is to see if she could handle all her expenses just as the poor do day to day. So Barbara goes out her way to perform an experience using her Ph.D. in Biology. She created three rules for her experiment. 1). Accept the cheapest housing or place she could find, 2). She must also try her best to keep a job; especially the job that pays the most and 3). She cannot use her degree or anything from her professional/regular life to get by if something happens to fail. As hard as she tried to follow the rules, she broke them anyhow
Jonathan Kozol revealed the early period’s situation of education in American schools in his article Savage Inequalities. It seems like during that period, the inequality existed everywhere and no one had the ability to change it; however, Kozol tried his best to turn around this situation and keep track of all he saw. In the article, he used rhetorical strategies effectively to describe what he saw in that situation, such as pathos, logos and ethos.
In 102 Minutes, Chapter 7, authors Dwyer and Flynn use ethos, logos, and pathos to appeal to the readers’ consciences, minds and hearts regarding what happened to the people inside the Twin Towers on 9/11. Of particular interest are the following uses of the three appeals.
Barbara Ehrenreich, started her socioeconomic experiment in Key West, Florida. Her initial effort is to secure a place to live and a job that will support her. In the beginning, Ehrenreich finds that applying for low wage jobs can be a daunting task. Eventually, she finds work as a waitress at a local restaurant. The author discovers that the work is physically and mentally challenging. Ehrenreich develops a distaste for management while working at the establishment. She watches management sit around and treat employees poorly. Management does not value their workforce and routinely show a lack of compassion for their employees. Additionally, Ehrenreich uncovers an economic condition that the working poor face. The dilemma is if the working poor cannot make enough money for a security deposit for an apartment, then they are forced to live in crappy hotels. This enlightens another socioeconomic issue, nutritious food. Most hotel rooms do not have kitchenettes in which food can be prepared. This perpetuates many working poor going to fast food establishments to eat. Without health insurance, this can provide more health issues for low wage workers.
“People who had incurred the displeasure of the party simply disappeared and were never heard of again.
She knows she will never truly experience poverty because this is nothing more than a project but she leaves behind her old life and becomes known as a divorced homemaker reentering the workforce after many years. Her main goal is to get enough income to be able to pay for all her expenses and have enough money to pay next months rent.
The fight for racial equality is one of the most prominent issues Americans have faced throughout history and even today; as the idea that enslaving individuals is unethical emerged, many great and innovative authors began writing about the issues that enslaved people had to face. Olaudah Equiano was no exception. In his work The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, he attempts to persuade his readers that the American way of slavery is brutal, inhumane, and unscrupulous. Equiano manages to do this by minimizing the apparent differences between himself and his primarily white audience, mentioning the cruelties that he and many other slaves had to face, and the advantages of treating your slaves correctly.
However, she never really experienced the actual life of living in poverty as the majority of people living in poverty experience. Barbara, an educated white women had just that on other people living in poverty, because of the color of her skin and education level that is more often than not restricted from people living in poverty. She was able and more qualified for jobs than other people living amongst the status she was playing. She also was able to more readily seek better benefits than people living in poverty. When she first start her journey in Florida she had a car, a car that in most cases people living in poverty do not have. She was also able to use the internet to find local jobs and available housing in the area that many people living in poverty are restricted from. Another great benefit she had was the luxury of affording a drug detox cleansing her of drugs deemed bad. Many people living in poverty do not have much extra cash laying around much less fifty dollars to afford a detox for prescription drugs. She also had the luxury to afford her prescription drugs, another option that many people living in poverty do not have. Another element that made Barbara’s experience not that genuine was the fact that she was not providing for anybody other than herself. Twenty-two percent of kids under the age of 18 are living below the poverty line (http://npc.umich.edu/poverty/#5) , Barbara did not have to provide for pets or kids which would of changed her experience altogether of living in poverty. Not to belittle Barbara’s experience, but many factors of what life is like living in poverty were not taken into consideration during her
Pollan’s article provides a solid base to the conversation, defining what to do in order to eat healthy. Holding this concept of eating healthy, Joe Pinsker in “Why So Many Rich Kids Come to Enjoy the Taste of Healthier Foods” enters into the conversation and questions the connection of difference in families’ income and how healthy children eat (129-132). He argues that how much families earn largely affect how healthy children eat — income is one of the most important factors preventing people from eating healthy (129-132). In his article, Pinsker utilizes a study done by Caitlin Daniel to illustrate that level of income does affect children’s diet (130). In Daniel’s research, among 75 Boston-area parents, those rich families value children’s healthy diet more than food wasted when children refused to accept those healthier but
I think before Ehrenreich first began the experiment she assumed that with her previous education she would quickly be able to grasp any additional information she learned at a new occupation quite simply. She seemed to have an arrogance to the way she talked about the lower class, which is expected given she had never experienced anything like this before. At first she didn’t seem to understand that she really needed to be watching what she spent her money on. She got a job inconveniently located from where she was residing, making her spend unnecessary money on gas, while she was also buying herself 30 dollar pants stating that it was “necessary”. In the beginning of the book she says that her goal is to “see whether or not I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do everyday.” With some quick research I soon found out that she was actually making more than what was considered the poverty level, and without many additional expenses that one in that living condition would usually be paying. It’s skeptical that she was still struggling so greatly while making more than living wage, giving the impression that she may have been inadequately portraying her true experiences to make for a more heartfelt and interesting story. Even though I think there are steps she could have taken to be more accurate, such as not having transportation etc., I still do think the more personal way she described the hardships she
Gorgias’ use of rhetoric in the Encomium of Helen helps even more to prove Helen of Troy is innocent. He uses a type of speech called epideictic speech. Helen eloped with Paris of Troy which ignited a destructive war between Greece and Troy. Gorgias attempts to take the blame off Helen in the Encomium of Helen. The reasons Gorgias gives for Helen being innocent are will of fate, the wishes of the gods, the votes of necessity, by force reduced, by words seduced, and by love possessed. Gorgias lays out the reasons for Helen fleeing Sparta, disproves each reason, and reproves Helen of the blame towards the end. He borrowed some of his techniques of persuasion from Socrates.
The Letter from Birmingham Jail was written by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April of 1963. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of several civil rights activists who were arrested in Birmingham Alabama, after protesting against racial injustices in Alabama. Dr. King wrote this letter in response to a statement titled A Call for Unity, which was published on Good Friday by eight of his fellow clergymen from Alabama. Dr. King uses his letter to eloquently refute the article. In the letter dr. king uses many vivid logos, ethos, and pathos to get his point across. Dr. King writes things in his letter that if any other person even dared to write the people would consider them crazy.
In her expose, Nickel and Dime, Barbara Ehrenreich shares her experience of what it is like for unskilled women to be forced to be put into the labor market after the welfare reform that was going on in 1998. Ehrenreich wanted to capture her experience by retelling her method of “uncover journalism” in a chronological order type of presentation of events that took place during her endeavor. Her methodologies and actions were some what not orthodox in practice. This was not to be a social experiment that was to recreate a poverty social scenario, but it was to in fact see if she could maintain a lifestyle working low wage paying jobs the way 4 million women were about to experience it. Although Ehrenreich makes good use of rhetoric (ethos, pathos, logos), she is very effective at portraying pathos, trying to get us to understand why we should care about a social situation such as this through, credibility, emotion, and logic.
In “Serving in Florida” by Barbara Ehrenreich, the author discusses the living condition in a lower class society. Ehrenreich described her experiences as a waiter and housekeepers. Throughout the article she vividly expressed her thought and her situation by using tone, voice, word choice and imagery to show the struggles that she went through while trying to live on minimum wage.
Ehrenreich’s motives gave her the tools to experience poverty from a statistical standpoint, but kept her from experiencing the problems poor people face everyday in life. The insight to the fact that maybe a person on welfare needs to be there not because they do not work hard enough but because the way society is setup they are going to be doomed to from the beginning. For example, her personal experiences described gives the reader knowledge that unless you are “Superman” you can almost never work enough to get ahead in life, and you would not have enough time to “go to college” to gain the education for a higher paying job. The first person point-of-view personalizes the book and that allowed me to be drawn into the storyline and plot completely. Some ways she handled situations angered me.
A woman who had lived an unsteady life throughout her childhood was negatively affected as an adult by the things that she had went through in her earlier years. In an article entitled “One Family 's Story Shows How The Cycle Of Poverty Is Hard To Break,” Pam Fessler stated that “Like many before her, she carried her poverty into adulthood, doing odd jobs with periods of homelessness and hunger.” The woman had realized that her children were being negatively affected by the unsteady lifestyle that they were living. The mother had said that her six year old daughter had emotional issues, which led to her making herself throw up after eating, running away, and talking about killing herself (Fessler). The little girl had been emotionally affected by poverty, which caused her to do things that most six year olds would not think about doing. The people who live in poverty as a child are more likely to struggle in adulthood. Poverty has many negative effects on children and tends to affect the way they grow and live the rest of their life as an