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CANCAN AI
Prof. Landrus
ENGL 101X
20 October 2015

SCHOOL VIOLENCE AND DISRUPTION: CAN UNIFORMS CURB PROBLEMS?:

Rhetorical Analysis

You must heard about or experienced a lot of school violence issues

happening all the time. How did you feel about that? Have you ever wanted to
solve this issue? One of the most popular school policy is school uniform
policy, but do you think it can help to decrease the school violence rate?
Lillian O. Holloman thinks that it can. Lillian O. Holloman is an assistant
professor of clothing and textiles in Virginia Tech's College of Human
Resources. She has surveyed solutions used by school systems to decrease
the incidence of youth-on-youth violence, particularly as it relates to clothing.
In her article, School violence and disruption: can uniforms curb problems?
she utilizes many rhetorical strategies to persuade her audience that uniforms
is a great means of eliminating or diminishing clothing-related youth violence.
Holloman uses logos, ethos, pathos and kairos to emphasize that school
uniform policy has a lot of benefits toward solving the school violence, and
insists that all the school should try to adopt this policy to provide safe and
healthy environments for youth development.

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Before going deeper on this issue, its important to understand whose

involved in it. Holloman discusses relationship between the adoption of
uniform policy and the school violence. As a result, the school officials
opinions are very important, just as the parents and students are. The reason
why school officials and parents are vital is that they can control it, if they
adopt this policy. They have that kind of power to decide to use this policy or
not. As to the students, they play as the main role on this issue, because what
they feel about the uniform policy is the key element to determine that if its
effective and can curb school violence. Holloman uses few appeals to
persuade these audiences to adopt this policy.
At the beginning of this article,the author utilizes pathos,an appeal to
the emotion to captain the concern and interest of the readers. In order to
illustrate that the youth violence is widespread and happens frequently, the
author inquires At any given time, major newspapers in the state report
incidences of one or more of the following assault categories: youth-on-youth,
youth-on- adult, or youth-on-child. (Holloman 1). By presenting these daily
circumstances, audiences may feel a personal connection with this issue.
They may find these teenagers violence on the newspaper everyday, like the
author inquires, and they become aware that this is a real serious problem
after this emphasis. This pathos use at the beginning of the article helps to set
the interests of the readers by presenting an daily scene which can promote
them to read the whole article and shows the urgency and exigency of youth
violence.

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Holloman implements logos, which is an appeal of logic. She uses it to

emphasis how serious school violence is, which can also show the credibility.
The author use Virginia as a sample to analyze this issue through this article.
In the referencing of the background of school violence, she presents In
1990, according to the Almanac of the 50 States, Virginia had 1,061,583
persons between the ages of 5 and 17, the school-age years.(Holloman 2)
This demonstrates the big number of the school-age students and how urgent
school violence is. The author uses this logos effectively, because 1,061,583
is such a large number and age 5 to 17 is the age period which one can be
impacted most easily. This statistic reminds the readers to have a more
serious mind to read this article, because this issue can really impact most of
our kids. Also, it makes the readers know that its the time to take an action to
solve this problem. By using the logos, the author establishes the exigence of
solving the school violence problem.
The author appeals to ethos to gain credibility, by acknowledging the
opinions of school officials, parents, and students to support her idea. This
helps Hollomans opinion becoming more reasonable. According to school
officials, parents, and students, the benefits of wearing uniforms include
decreased class disruptions, fights, and teasing about clothes. (Holloman 3).
That can make the benefit of school uniform become more reliable, and, at the
same time, since this advantages are good for those important groups who

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are powerful to decide if adopt the school uniform policy. Hollomans idea
become more acceptable. By presenting those groups opinions toward school
uniform, the author use ethos to illustrate that her argument is credible and
can be easily accepted by most of the stakeholders. Its a great ethos for
Holloman to gain her credibility by addressing the stakeholders viewpoints
and make her idea become more trustworthy for her audience.
Since its important to address the urgency of adopting the school
uniform policy, Holloman uses kairos, an appeal of time to show the exigence
of it. By doing so, the author can also easily deliver the importance and the
reason why we need to adopt this policy at this time. In recent years, school
officials have observed that a significantly increasing number of antisocial,
even violent, acts performed by youths both on and off school premises have
been related to clothing.(Holloman 1) This demonstrates that since the
clothing-related violence has become more serious in recent years. Its urgent
to adopt the school uniform policy to try to sooth this issue. This kairos
definitely shows the situation that clothing-related violence is very bad and can
really impact the student's daily life in school. For that, the author shows
exigence by showing the recent negative situation and also showing how
important it is to adopt school uniform policy immediately before this situation
becomes worse.
All in all, Holloman uses few good rhetorical strategies to emphasize
that the school uniform can curb the school violence and we need to adopt
this policy as soon as possible because its such an urgent problem,especially

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because school should be the safest place in this country. Appeals to pathos
helped build the relationship between the readers and this issue and make
them interested in it. Appeals to logos show exigence of school violence.
Appeals to ethos show the author's opinion are reliable and trustworthy.
Finally, appeals to kairos shows urgency for the public to adopt school uniform
policy. These rhetorical strategies work well together to argue that school
violence is in a serious situation and we need to adopt school uniform policy to
solve it urgently.

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Work Cited

Lillian O. Holloman, School Violence and Disruption: Can Uniforms Curb

Problems? Virginia 2.2(1995):1-3. Print