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Rhetorical Analysis Of Too Poor To Make The News By Barbara Ehrenreich

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In a New York Times article, “Too Poor to Make the News,” author Barbara Ehrenreich focuses on the impact the recession has caused to the lives of the working poor. She begins her article by describing how the newly group, known as Nouveau poor, have to give up valuables where as the working poor have to give up housing, food, and prescription medicines. Ehrenreich’s purpose is to inform her readers who are blessed enough not to suffer like the working poor. Barbara Ehrenreich’s article examines the impacts the recession has on the lives of the working poor, by demonstrating pathos, and makes readers aware of the sufferings the poor have to face. Barbara Ehrenreich examines the aspects that are impacting the working poor from the recession. Her concern is that this group is being ignored while the media focuses on “The super-rich give up personal jets” (337). Ehrenreich revisits …show more content…

Pathos dominates the article when Ehrenreich allows her nephews mother in law, grandchildren, and daughter to move into her house. The situation focuses on pathos because in Ehrenreich’s personal story she includes that “Peg, was, like several million other Americans, about to lose her home to foreclosure” (338). She is effective in her writing by appealing to the readers’ emotions through visual concepts and personal experiences. When I read the article, I felt emotional because the working poor are not fortunate to know if they will have a house or food the next day. I agree with Ehrenreich in which the poor are as important as the wealthy group who get more recognition. Both groups are losing valuables they cannot afford as mentioned by Ehrenreich, “Like the Nouveau Poor, the already poor descend through a series of deprivations, though these are less likely to involve forgone vacations than missed meals and medications”

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Ehrenreich learns and also hopes to teach her audience, which is anyone who has not experienced a low wage job or does not believe that low paying jobs are very difficult, that all the successors should credit the hardest workers at the bottom of the ladder. She calls “the 'working poor' [...] the major philanthropists of our society [because] they neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high” (120). Ehrenreich simply aims for the privileged audience to understand why they are living such comfortable lives and where all of it comes from. Also, the author implies that the upper class is perfectly kept in balance by the lower class, and that it is owed to the single mothers, poor parents, and uneducated hard workers for others’

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