Liberal Arts: An Analysis Of The Persuasion Of Liberal Arts

This author uses a variety of persuasive techniques in his essay to craft

an extremely well thought-out argument for why liberal arts is useful. The author

purposely evoked certain feelings such as anxiety and empathy, which kept the

readers engaged throughout the passage. He proceeds to alleviate these

concerns by providing liberal arts education as an alternative, thus making the

readers want to peruse the liberal educations. This is further emphasized

through the incorporation of credible evidences and listing some of the most

successful cases as examples.

The author is mindfully persuasive from the very beginning, introducing

the topic with a dramatization that draws the reader in. The passage starts off

by describing a family

After this initial dramatization, the author goes on to refute the claims

against the persuasion of the liberal arts education. In order to effectively

contradicts these claims, the author appeals to the parents by mentioning

relative examples such as son’s unemployment and “relinquish[ing] hopes for a

charming daughter”. After mentioning these concerns, the author claims that

these thoughts are trivial and assures them by stating benefits that the students

could acquire such as “variety of professional fields and career paths, [while]

molding open-minded, curious problem solvers”. Furthermore, the author ends

the paragraph by sentence written in the first point of view of the student, shown

through the first quote of “mom and dad”, the author appealed to both students

and the parents by assuring them that the author considers both perspectives of

the parents and the students. Although the author’s initial rebuttal argument

specifically targeted the parents by mentioning reasons that may be their

common concern, the author’s sincere purpose was to refute against the

conventional thoughts of the parents, not the parents themselves; this

The author cleverly related the liberal arts with the

fields that the “parents” may feel important; this attempts to relate the liberal arts

with other fields made the parents to reconsider understanding of the field of

liberal art. This was followed by specific statistics such as “A third of all Fortune

500 CEOs possess liberal arts degrees”, and “”93% of employers say that “a

demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve

complex problems is more important than undergraduate major”. These

appealed to the reader’s own anxieties and functioned to ease the concerns of

the readers themselves. Also, the author appeals to the parents who desires

“assured” jobs of their child by stating the skills gained from the liberal arts is

imperishable, thus distinguishable from other job: “will neither be replaced nor

outdated”. The author then states that the persuasion of liberal art expands to

lifelong learning skill and ends with rhetorical question of “is that not what you

want for you baby boy”, which appealed to parents’ deep wishes for their child,

thus creating intimacy. This made the author’s argument to sound more genuine

and appealing to the parents; also, by subsequently placing the evidence