David Sedaris A Plague Of Tics

Many psychological disorders go unnoticed and uncared for: many people do not even know that is what they are struggling with. In one such instance, written by David Sedaris, he recollects his childhood dealing with an obsessive compulsive disorder in the narrative essay, “A Plague of Tics”. He argues that no matter what he did he could not control the actions his brain transmitted him to do. Sedaris uses emotional appeals,such as ethos and logos. He also utilizes descriptive language to support his credibility, describing personal facts and experiences. The first rhetorical device David Sedaris uses appeals to logic. “According to her calculations, I had left my chair twenty-eight times that day.” (360), appealing to ethos, the emotional

He covets this method very much in his essay because it is the main connection to the argument he is trying to get across. On page 362 Sedaris proclaims “What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it.” In this statement David is making a remark that he had no idea how to make the demands coming from inside of him stop, drawing many emotional connections of sympathy and understanding of the complexity in his obsessive behavioral disorder. He also discusses how it never occurred to him that other people recognized his abnormal behaviors, such on page 363; “Because my actions were so intensely private, I had always assumed they were somehow invisible.”, and on page 369 when he mentions his roommate. Engaging an understanding in the readers that he really did not understand what he was doing and how it was wrong, once again prevailing in the emotional aspect. David Sedaris effectively uses rhetorical devices in “A Plague of Tics”, a narrative essay about his obsessive compulsive disorder. He uses various examples of ethos and pathos to create connections between himself and the reader, overall proving his argument that he could not control the actions he was