Dava Sobel's Longitude Rhetorical Essay

Longitude Rhetorical Essay In the novel “Longitude”, Dava Sobel narrates her argument that John Harrison was an unacknowledged genius by combining her research process of accounting historical and biblical accounts of traveling, thus showing her credibility in her research with an expanded ethos. Then, Sobel introduces the pathos by expressing her opinionated emotions towards the topic by creating an opinionated bias and molding it into the readers mind to engage the reader in the argument. Finally, Sobel lays out her logos by showing her explanation of her research process and laying out her argument’s logic by restating events and knowledge of prior astronomers and philosophers that led up to Harrison’s work and how he was the first to put his ideas into an invention. Overall, Sobel is successful in her argument as she develops it through accounting multiple sources and perspectives on the topic. She also engages the reader in the argument by creating a biased attachment to Harrison, and lays out the argument of how successful Harrison’s work was by accounting her ethos once more.

In the quote “on October 22, 1707, at the Scilly Isles four homebound British warships ran aground and nearly two thousand men lost their lives.”(Sobel, P.6). Sobel accounts a few examples of how the lack of being able to plot longitude on a grid would result in getting lost on sea. It also shows how this problem was an issue that astronomers, sailors, and even philosophers struggled with finding a solution to for centuries, making the asperity of the problem much more severe. This gives the reader a bit of a understanding of the importance of longitude and further convinces the reader in her favor of how important Harrison’s invention was to the