Rhetorical Analysis: Growing Up Empty

Rhetoric is the art of using language to persuade an audience. Writers and speakers often use rhetoric appeals. Aristotelian Rhetoric appeals are used in arguments to support claims and counter opposing arguments. Rhetoric used four different approaches to capture its audience’s attention: pathos, logos, and ethos. Pathos bases its appeal on provoking strong emotion from an audience. Ethos builds its appeal based on good moral character of the writer or speaker and relies on good sense and good will to influence its audience. Logos persuades its audience through the use of deductive and inductive reasoning. The kiaros approach requires a combination of creating and recognizing the right time and right place for making the argument in the first place. All of these appeals are important tools, and can be used together or apart to persuade an audience.

In her book, titled, Growing Up Empty, award winning public service journalist, speaker and author of eight books—Loretta Shwartz-Nobel brilliantly employs all four of these appeals.. Known primarily for her advocating work, Schwartz-Nobel achieved national acclaim, in 1974, for her published in Philadelphia magazine, in which she brought attention to the hardships of the poor and destitute living in the otherwise typical American city of Philadelphia. The article proved worthy of the 1975 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award “for outstanding coverage of the problems of the disadvantaged"(8-9). In her book, Schwartz-Noble takes her reader on a behind the scenes look at an impoverish America. Her book chronicles true life stories of some of these poverty stricken individuals living among us. It portrays some of the events that led up to forcing one in ten families to depend on food ban...

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...36.2 million Americans ( ) and continues to spread devastation across the nation at an ever increasing and alarming rate (4). The author used rhetoric appeals to capture her audience’s attention and provoke them to act upon the problem of hunger and poverty in America/ By using pathos, the writer was able to pull at her writer’s heartstrings and evoke strong emotions. By furnishing the reader with relevant and logical information to draw from, she proved herself to be a person of authority on the subject. Schwartz-Nobel’s credibility was proven when she made it clear that she was not basing her information solely on statistics, but rather she had at the proof to back up her findings. Lastly, the writer employs kiaros by taking the reader back to the time when hunger in America was first recognized as a problem to the epidemic it has evolved into today.