Ethos Pathos Logos

Literary Devices Strengthen Arguments

Ethos can be described as “the character or emotions of a speaker that is expressed in the attempt to persuade an audience” according to the Britannica encyclopedia. Ethos provides credibility for Jeffery Selingo in his piece “Why more teenagers and college students Need to Work While in School,” he argues about college students and working while getting an education. He brings up many points and strengthens his points through the use of literary and rhetorical devices. For instance, he backs up his argument by providing logos to give factual information that readers can trust. Throughout Selingos’ argumentative piece, he uses statistics, other people's information, and words that have distinct feelings.

Logos can back up what is being said, and strengthen what is being argued. Selingo talks about how students go into college with no experience in jobs and he backs this up with “The number of teenagers who have some sort of job while in school has dropped from nearly 40% in 1990 to just 205 today, an all-time low since the United states started keeping track in 1948,” (paragraph 2). This backs up what is being said by using real data from real sources to give the reader real insight and side with Selingo. Logos can also be used to ensure that what the reader is reading is factual. Selingo talks about how students would work full time and that “they would earn only $15,000 a year at federal minimum wage. That’s about half of the published tuition price at an average…,” (paragraph 9). Logos help strengthen the argument here and shows the reader real information so that the reader can get a grasp on the real-life effects of getting a job while pursuing an education. Logos can also be shown through graphs. In “1889-1990 Americans in school and working worked an average of 30 hours and had around $10,000 in student debt” (table 1). This is real data that can show exact numbers and give the reader a little bit more insight into Selingo’s

Loaded words can help show the reader if there is a negative or positive tone in a paragraph or sentence. Students try and work hard but “the behaviors they found were unacceptable” (paragraph 12). In this sentence, the word unacceptable shows that the behavior is bad and that it is negative, and this can persuade the reader's feelings to side with Selingo. Loaded words can also help Selingo get his point across. Getting a job can be difficult especially “on a lackluster youth job market…” (paragraph 3). The word lackluster has a negative connotation and it helps Selingo show that the youth job market is horrible it is crazy. The one word changes the whole feeling of the sentence and that's why loaded words do so well in getting a point across. Loaded words can also persuade the reader to side with Selingo. Students do not know what it is like “learning from failures or hardships…” (paragraph 5). The word failure in this instance is a loaded word due to its very negative connotation, this word shows that college students do not have much experience and it would make the reader feel like students need to be working while getting an