Republic Of Outsiders Analysis

In the novel Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers, and Rebels, Alyssa Quart explores the idea of buying hand-made products instead of mass-made products in chapter seven titled Beyond Mass Marketing. This specific chapter describes the movement to encourage the public to buy hand-made products. The outsiders argue that the mass produced products are wasteful to the environment and that they are impersonal to the individual consumers. Mass produced items are often poorly made, have a short time of functioning usage, and greatly contribute to a wasteful consumer culture. They also argue that by buying products straight from the creator so that the consumers know where they are coming from, it produces a unique sort of trust

Most of Etsy’s members subscribe to the mantra “Mass production is over.” At last count, the site hosted 17 million listed items and enjoyed 1.4 billion monthly page views. It grossed $525.6 million sales in 2011 (Quart 165).
An appeal to logic includes using facts to explain Quart’s point and reasoning. When she used the facts and figures on one of the online companies that sells hand-made crafts, she used the facts to show how big of a company they are which ends up showing that the outsider’s movement is growing and the public is becoming more and more aware of what is going on.
Quart also uses pathos, an appeal to emotion, very effectively in parts of the chapter without using it as an overload. An appeal to emotion is defined as a literary device that is used as “a means of convincing someone of the character or credibility of the persuader” (yourdictionary.com). She uses the emotional appeal to use Callie Janoff’s statements by explaining Janoff as someone who spends most of her time hand crafting goods and is the founder of ‘The Church of Craft’, which is a communal group that is known for handcrafting goods, such as, mostly knitwear or older materials just sewn together. Quart then uses Janoff’s statement, “Our consumerism plagues our quiet lives, filling it with broadcast noise and boxes of macaroni and cheese. But when we make something, we are filled with satisfaction, the kind you feel to your very core” (Quart 163). She uses this to produce a good response in the