'The Achievement Habit' By Bernard Roth

“Reasons are Bull shit” Chapter two of the Bernard Roths book “The Achievement Habit” where it explains how most people don’t fully understand how they make up excuses to make them feel better for the things they don’t want to own. The main objective of chapter two of Roth’s book is trying to have people understand that there is always something we find to excuse us from our own wrongs. Roth starts his second chapter out by Saying “The problem with reasons is that they’re just excuses prettied up” (Roth 39). He talks about how his students in class will always say”that’s a good reason” when they hear somebody with an excuse. Roth uses Aristotle’s Rhetorical Triangle as implying ethos, pathos, and logos to support his main points within chapter

Pathos is an emotional appeal of speech which is mostly how Roth gets his readers involved with his book. In chapter two one of the best examples on how Roth uses ethos is in the beginning when he is explaining the story of how he was late for a board meeting and would come up with some sort of excuse. He explains how he would say an excuse to the board chair-man to make himself feel better about being late. Well Roth says that “still, I had held things up, and the other board members, who had arrived on time, were clearly not thrilled. Deep down I knew that the highway traffic was not the real issue.” This quote shows how Roth uses his personal life to have his readers get to an emotional understanding of the main points he’s trying to get across. Other examples of him using pathos are when Roth tells a person to exercise an activity with another by starting with giving a statement that says “The reason I . . .”, “That’s a good reason” (Roth 43). Roth says the point of this exercise is “you won’t have to search within your answers very long to find the bullshit” (Roth 43), therefore this gets readers more in touch with their feeling about themselves, their lives, and their emotions. Later in chapter two Roth starts to talk about what stops people from doing what they want. He gets emotional with this part of the chapter by explaining to his readers that the small things that

Logos are the part of speech that implies logic behind one point they may be trying to get a point across to their audience. Roth uses logic in a lot throughout chapter two. Logos is another great example of how Roth gets his audience 's attention. For example, in chapter two Roth starts talking about how people meant he opposite what they say, while he talks about that he gives out the logic behind his statements about people meaning different things of what they say. The logic Roth gives people behind him telling people that we say the opposite of what people say is him explaining how people end up usually not doing what they say or being the opposite of what they want others to see them as. Roth says “I am sure we all have at one time or another said the opposite of what we mean-and let’s face it, as much as we like to convince ourselves that our motives are pure, we are generally more concerned about ourselves” (Roth 46) this quote gives people a better understanding that he’s comparing what he says with most people’s actions.

Throughout chapter two, Roth uses Aristotle strangle many times trying to get his readers to understand his meaning of chapter two “Reasons are Bullshit” by using ethos, pathos, and logos. As Roth talks about in chapter two how reasons are bullshit it turns into him explaining how people need to be accomplishing things without getting distracted.