Thursday, July 18, 2013

Commentary: Calvin Steyn

                Your essay overall is pretty good. You just need more description and add a paragraph or two on ethos because that is missing from your paper. For your title, you need to add one that reflects what you are going to be writing about. Your ideas in all of your paragraphs are very good and evaluate the success of the three appeals, but in order to persuade the reader, you need to add more evidence and explanation on why it was successful. Your intro paragraph is pretty good. I think you should add a paragraph before that giving a summary of the article that you are writing your essay on so the reader kind of gets the gist of what the article is about and what you are talking about. Your thesis is very clear and it states how all of the rhetorical strategies were successful.
            In all of your paragraphs you have a very clear topic sentence, then a quote with an explanation of how it persuades. To make your paper stronger you should add more detail to your quote expanding more on how the author is successful with the specific rhetorical style you are writing about in that paragraph.
            Your essay identifies specific examples of logical appeals used in the source text. The paragraph on logos does not include any quotes though which I think you should add. All of the information that you provide in the paragraph is sufficient and you use point out very good points that fit into the logos category. The example that you use of when Hitchens was being water boarded is a good example and makes your argument successful. I believe that readers will be persuaded by these appeals, especially if you add a little bit more explanation and detail to persuade the reader.

            Your paragraph on appeals to pathos is very good. You give a quote that strongly fits in with appeal to pathos but you need to elaborate more and explain why the use of it was successful in the article. It is a good start though; it just needs a little bit more added to it to support your thesis. 

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