Rhetorical Analysis Of Alfred Edmond Jr.

Persuading an audience requires a bit of tact and respect. A successful persuasive article treats their opposing side’s position as a valid stance, but respectfully informs that side why their stance does not hold up as an argument as it doesn’t have any real data to support their claim. Alfred Edmond Jr. is a vice president and editor of the magazine, Black Enterprise, and the argument he articulates, which he published in the magazine he works for, is that business employers should be able to ask for an employee's Facebook password. Edmond fails in succeeding at his argument because he lacks to support his claims substantially, provide credibility and reliability to his ability to take a stance on this issue, and understand and respect his

He utilizes a study from New York about inappropriate teacher-student behavior in the state, but fails to specify what exactly it says or who did the study. Not only that, but he lacks to name the study, who studied it, and what exactly the numbers are. This leads the reader to believe that his claim of the study may be insubstantial and possibly false or misleading. His claim fails here because he just assumes that his audience will just take his word for it. Giving a paraphrase of a graph can be easily biased towards one side, as one can say that the rates went up, and the audience will misconstrue that as a drastic change, rather than a possibly normal spike that occurs with nature. Another claim he doesn’t articulate further on, is the privacy aspect of social media. He disregards that the point of the argument is not about a post a person makes, it’s being able to see their private messages and other personal things through Facebook, and so he is misleading in his claim that social media isn’t private, as he isn’t addressing the actual issue brought to the table. Edmond has been misleading in his information since the beginning of his article, and all of his main claims were not accurately supported through further

However, he then claims a position where he states that he would concede if he was an employee but then says he doesn’t because he is a boss. It is hard to believe his concession when it isn’t his privacy being violated, and it makes his statement seem very hypocritical, which hurts his argument. When he says he is a business owner, he makes the claim that having their Facebook password would make it easier to see if their employees are engaging in any illegal activity. However, he fails to understand that background checks are accessible and comprehensible, so his credibility takes a dive here, because as a business owner, he should stick to a more professional route of obtaining employees previous criminal behaviors. With this unprofessional behavior, his position as a vice president seems to not be taken as seriously, and thus he loses a bit of ground on his