Malcolm Gladwell Small Change Rhetorical Analysis

1396 Words6 Pages

Writers do their job because they want to express their ideas to make an impact on the readers. Sometimes they want to convince their audience through persuasion. They can do it using different rhetorical elements such as logos, ethos, and pathos. These are Greek words that mean logic, character, and emotion consecutively. In “Small Change”, Malcolm Gladwell explains how activism is affected by social media. Gladwell looks negatively upon new “tools” of social media for activism, in particular social activism. She thinks this form of activism is weak and perhaps not even activism. She defends activism as unions of people who have a personal relationship and fight against a conflict that involves them all. An example of this in the text is the Civil Rights movement, where African …show more content…

He uses statistics to make his article logical, while projecting given evidence to his point. She gives statistics like when she states “Seventy thousand students eventually took part” (Gladwell, 2010, paragraph 6) and uses scholarly references. Scholarly references are a type of reference written by professionals who are experts on the field. She gives scholarly references such as Stanford Sociologist Doug McAdam (Gladwell, 2010, paragraph 12), sociologist Mark Granovetter (Gladwell, 2010, paragraph 16), he uses these sociologist because he wants to give to her article an objective view even though he does not accomplish this. Referring to specialists not always gives articles strong evidences. She refers to a book called “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change”(Gladwell, 2010, paragraph 17), to make a counter argument. He explains how in this case a child with leukemia found a transplant thank to social media. This argument makes her thesis less credible. She refers to Al Qaeda (Gladwell, 2010, paragraph 26) explaining that since it became a network it is less