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Barbara Lazear Ascher's On Compassion

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Full-time writer Barbara Lazear Ascher’s 1988 essay “On Compassion” conveys her perspective about interactions between people of different social classes to reveal her opinion on the reasons for compassion and where compassion should come from. Ascher’s purpose is to have her audience question the ways that compassion can be shown and to challenge society’s fear of “raw humanity”(11). She adopts a warm but clinical tone in order to prompt her audience, the literate and the intellectually curious, to question the motives behind compassion. Ascher begins her essay by invoking the primal fear of when anyone or anything unfamiliar approaches. She juxtaposes a man in a “buttonless shirt” (1) to a woman shopping on “Madison Avenue” (1). Ascher highlights
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In Barbara Lazear Ascher’s essay titled “On Compassion” Ascher considers the concept of compassion by utilizing her own encounters with the homeless as a vehicle to make her argument. In her argument, she interprets compassion as an abstract concept, and portrays empathy as a building block to compassion; making the argument that to be a more tolerant society one must first learn empathy in order to demonstrate true compassion. When analyzing Ascher’s rhetoric, her style, diction and rhetorical devices reveal a skeptical tone and serve a greater purpose in appealing to the reader’s sense of ethos and pathos. Namely, Ascher’s use of first-person narrative and word choice like “we” appeals to the reader’s sense of ethos, which eventually builds

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In Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich opens up a region of contemporary Native American life and shows a humane yet uncompromising state of mind toward its relatives. She likewise creates a bit of fiction whose system intensifies its significance. In taking every necessary step to follow out connections, monitor the characters, and see how they are tangled, the novel turns into a part of the connecting and interlacing that’s what the novel’s main topic. During ht enovel several questions are coming up and for the reader it can be joyfully to answer this questions given by Louise Erdrich. What truly matters are the powers of profound piety and secret and bitterness, the wishes and qualities and shortcomings that keep these individuals together, despite

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Pema Chodron formerly said, “Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.” People need to understand what people share is what makes everybody human. If they do not understand what makes us human than they will not know how to feel sympathy or compassion. If everybody thinks about it, we all go through some of the same situations. Everybody experiences, relationships, they may lose someone in their life, people make choices everyday, people may be obliged to use their flight or fight skills in survival, they might have to think about their morals when doing something, and everybody most definitely goes through different kinds of emotions every single day.

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The essay, “On Compassion,” by Barbara Lazear Ascher illustrates compassion and creates an empathetic connotation for the reader to ‘put their feet into the characters’ moccasins.’ In paragraphs one and two, a homeless man approaches a mother and her child. According to Ascher’s words, the woman “waits for the light to change, and her hands close tighter on the stroller’s handle as she sees the man approach.” On the streets most people turn away and ‘close themselves’ from interacting with the homeless, because of the look that the homeless give off.

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Julie Muncy builds an argument to support her claim that video games can't build empathy by first, explaining and giving examples of what empathy is and isn't. Then, she explains how games cant teach empathy. Finally, she explains how games don't make you a better person. First, Julie says “Empathy is active: it involves both mental acuity and changes to behavior.” “Understanding without change isn't empathy” also said by Julie muncy, means that if you can understand something but not change for the better for it then it isn't empathy because it shows that you don't care.

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Compassion is obtained from others. Depending on the circumstances, some people acquire compassion, and others do not. Mayella Violet Ewell, an 18-year-old white female, in Harper Lee’s, To Kill A Mockingbird, falsely accuses Tom Robinson, a black man, of sexually assaulting her, which commences a court case in the town of Maycomb, Alabama. Mayella has a tough life at home because of how her father treats her, and her overall reputation in the town of Maycomb is terrible, and she is considered white trash because she does not go to school and lives in bad conditions. Mayella Ewell deserves compassion because of her lack of knowledge.

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Living in a modern world many people get well educated and are making good changes in the world. But are we forgetting something in our busy society? George Saunders talks about the importance of kindness in his commencement address. Saunders is an American writer and university professor who made the commencement address at Syracuse University in New York state in may 2013. This essay will focus on the style of Saunders’ language and on the values he advocates in his speech.

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Based on this we can infer that individuals should go out of their way to help others out. Without Doc’s help, the sick people may have died. This influences the idea that individuals should help others because it would make a difference in the world. Like characterization, emotional appeal can be also used to define the role of the

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Frederick Buechner once said, “Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin.” Similarly, an author by the name of Barbara Lazear Ascher wrote an essay called “On Compassion,” in which she states that people learn about compassion when they experience hardships and begin to put oneself in another’s place. Along with the idea of compassion being learned, Ascher also tries to make us wonder what our motive is that leads us to being compassionate. Ascher tries to make us question why we feel the need to be compassionate towards others throughout her essay.

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In Nixon Waterman’s poem “To Know All is To Forgive All” and Matt Litton’s blog about the importance of compassion, these two works delineate the common theme that compassion is only possible if a person truly knows the other person. This theme is portrayed many times in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill A Mockingbird when a character steps into another person's shoes and shows compassion. For instance, when Scout stands “on the Radley’s porch” she starts to visualize her and Jem’s antics from Boo’s point of view (Lee 374). This relates to the theme of the poem because while Scout stood on the porch, she looks at the “‘why’ of things”, for her and the townsfolk actions (Waterman 15). After this event, Scout starts to gain compassion for why Boo

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This quote shows that even though Mairs sometimes has difficulty accepting her illness, she knows that there is a growing acceptance of people who must deal with the difficulties that she faces. This ultimately lends a hopeful and positive tone to an otherwise serious and depressing section of her essay. This contrast in tone, but general feeling of hope is key to the type of emotions that Nancy Mairs is trying to educate her readers about. Mair is successful in using multiple rhetorical strategies to connect with the reader.

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