Rhetorical Questions

Our last assignment in this Writing class was the Rhetorical Analysis of one or a couple Opinion article writers from the Denver Post newspaper. We had a few options we could choose from for our analysis and I chose to use three articles from David Harsanyi and rhetorically analyze them in his appeals to ethos, pathos and logos. However, I chose to focus more on his ethos and pathos than anything else. I analyzed three of his articles, “A stronghold on the GOP”, “Democrats don’t want their elders to be deciders”, and “Conservatives vs. McCain” for a couple reasons, the first is because they are all related on politics and if you read a few political articles from a writer, you can eventually tell how they feel on certain topics, which relates to their ethos. The other reason, is because after reading a couple articles, the reader can really tell if the writer has the authority or credibility to be writing on the topic. A couple of my paragraphs went something like this:
“This proves that Harsanyi has done research on the topic, because of the knowledge of McCain’s stance on issues and the bills he has supported, which adds to his credibility. Not only that, but this also shows that Senator McCain is a more moderate candidate because he calls himself a conservative, but stands for bills that most conservatives do not.”
And that’s just to get an idea, but I learned so much about appeals in this assignment. Things like how writers appeal to pathos and ethos, or how you can read into finding out about an authors ethos or even telling whether they are a credible writer or not.