Monday, November 5, 2012

Letter to Preston

  Here is a letter to an author named Preston who wrote a short essay about how using an alarm clock and waking up early can make you extremely successful. This essay is titled You Snooze, You Lose and  the link to the article is provided below. My letter addresses his use of ethos, pathos, and logos.  Logos relates to the words one uses. Ethos reflects the author and pathos represents the audience. In my letter I explain to Preston what he can change to better utilize pathos, ethos, and logos. These three items are highly important in writing to show credibility and proper rhetoric.

Article: http://thisibelieve.org/essay/90323/

Dear Preston,
            After reading your article “You Snooze, You Lose,” I discovered that there are a few ways you can better appeal to your audience using pathos, ethos, and logos.  First off, ethos is how one appeals from character and is designed to show the author’s credibility (205). To establish ethos, you must show that you have good judgment, understand what you are talking about, and be knowledgeable about your topic (208).  To improve your ethos, you need to prove that you are more knowledge able about the topic of the positives in waking up early.  If you went into more depth about how you have benefited from being an early-riser by providing specific examples of your experiences or provide an anecdote from a friend’s experience, then you will appear more knowledgeable to your reader. Further broadening your knowledge about your topic only enhances your credible evidence.
            Secondly, pathos drives the appeal to the emotions of your audience (199.)  To appeal to pathos, you must consider your tone, values of the reader, and provide examples that play on audience emotions (211).  Improving pathos must begin with establishing who your audience is, in other words, by whom your paper is primarily being read. Once the audience is chosen, applying pathos becomes easy.  For example, your article has a motivational aura to it, so perhaps your audience values a good motivating story or speech. Moreover, you can play on the audience’s emotions more by providing vivid details that give a sensory feel to the reader.
            Finally, logos deal with the logic and reason behind your argument.  Creating strong logos requires stating your premises, using credible evidence, and then declaring a conclusion.  Logos is where your paper can improve the most.  Since hardly any information is given about yourself, job, or background, it is hard to determine your credibility as a writer. The examples you give about yourself are hard to consider factual if we do not even know your last name or what you do for a living. Moreover, evidence from outside sources is needed to further strengthen your argument.  The examples you provide are adequate but more evidence is needed back up what you saying.  Therefore, your logos can be improved.
Sincerely,
Gina Richardella

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