In Best in Class, Margaret Talbot explains how the position of valedictorian should be kept in the school system, though the gravity around holding the position as well as how it is chosen should be changed. She uses logos to appeal to her massively student-based audience, as well as selective presentation to keep focus on her argument, rather than anything else. In her appeal to logos, Talbot mentions how GPAs play a massive part of how a valedictorian is and was chosen. In explaining how important a GPA is, and how weighted classes make it overly easy to get over a 4.0, she sets up a background for why it is becoming so hard to chose valedictorian by grade point average alone. She uses extreme cases, such as one in which someone got valedictorian by having a GPA with a “‘difference of .00154’” to push her point that the old way of choosing valedictorian by GPA causes a lot of problems, looping back to her argument, and pulling the reader in with her appeal to logos. In these stories she tells about valedictorian horror stories, they …show more content…
She knows that many people reading and critiquing her article would look down on her and push her ideas to the side if she was emotional and irrational in her thinking, so she keeps her article rather “dry” in order to let the reader not only create the emotions around the situations of valedictorian on their own, but decide which emotions they associate with each situation. If they want to be happy for the person who won a lawsuit, they could, if they wanted to be angry at the person who started a lawsuit, they could, if they wanted to agree or disagree with the principal who stopped naming a valedictorian, they could. In doing this kind of a “dry” writing that leads the reader to their own emotions, her argument can be seen as rational for not being based heavily in pathos, as many people expect women to