Rhetorical Analysis: Why College Athletes Shouldn T Be Paid

Imagine living in a world where you are paid to compete in an activity that you adore at a young age. Ever since I can remember, sports have been a major part of who I am. Never did the thought cross my mind of receiving a salary before making it your career. After researching the topic, authors such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Ryan Swanson, and Ekow Yankah all represent different viewpoints on the controversial topic whether or not college athletes should be paid. Despite each of the authors having polar opposite views on the topic, each author is similar by using rhetorical strategies to their advantage in trying to educate and persuade their audience. Through the use of appeal to ethics, personal experiences, and historical examples the authors

The article was published in The New Yorker on October 14, 2015. The author is Ekow N. Yankah who is identified in the article as a professor at the Cardozo School of Law (further research revealed the Cardozo School of Law is located in New York City). The second article titled, “It’s Time to Pay the Tab for America’s College Athletes” by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was written in January, 2018 and published in The Guardian. From the standpoint of rhetorical analysis, the identity of the authors of the two articles may be one of the most important factors in how the article is both perceived and received. In fact, it is possible that if the average reader knew nothing about what the articles actually said-if they did not read a word of either article - they may favor the side taken by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as compared to the side take by Ekow Yankah. This is an example of the rhetorical strategy appeal to ethics. While Yankah is probably a fine law professor, Abdul-Jabbar is one of the most iconic and beloved college and professional basketball players in the history of the game The fact that he led UCLA to a three-year record of 88-1 in which they won three national championships, followed by a 20-year NBA career with the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers in which he won six championships, became the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, and was named

Yankah is a very good writer who constructs his point very well and the same could be said of Abdul-Jabbar. Because Abdul-Jabbar is a legend, one tends to read his personal accounts of his own experiences very closely. Lacking that sort of background experience, Yankah uses effective examples to make the point that money is what has gotten us into the mess that has affected the NCAA and involving more money by paying athletes will do nothing to solve these problems. In order to provide further rhetorical analysis, a third article for comparison was written by Ryan Swanson, an assistant professor of history in the Honors College at the University of New Mexico. His October, 2017 Washington Post article is titled, Want to Clean Up College Athletics? Pay the Players! His strategy in the article is to give historical examples of the fact that the idea of paying college athletes is almost as old as college athletics