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Victoria De La Torre

Professor Beadle

English 115 Approaches to University Writing

22 September, 2019

Persuasion at its Best

Happiness, a controversial topic on which each person in society has their own ideas on

how to achieve. Society says the key to it is money, fame, and success. However some of our

very own celebrities admit that they are absolutely miserable with money and fame. Religious

people say that God is the key, but yet not everyone is religious. Others say it is within families

and children that they find happiness. Yet I have seen plenty of single people who are happy.

Therefore the question becomes what makes and breaks happiness? Well, three professionals try

to answer this question through their essays. One out of all them is the most effective in

answering the question of how we achieve happiness. Out of the three essays​ “​Living with

Less.​”A Lot Less​ by Graham Hill, “What Suffering Does​”​ by David Brooks, and “How Happy

Are You and Why?” by Sonja Lyubomirsky, the essay by Sonja Lyubomirsky “How Happy Are

You and Why?” is the most effective in conveying the authors ideas of happiness. The reasons

for this are because she uses real life situations to further engage with the audience and uses

credible university studies to both support her point and provide evidence for her argument.

Although Lyubomirsky uses detailed or professional language pertaining to the field of

study she engages the audience better in pathos than Graham Hill in his essay “Living with Less

A Lot Less” which used casual language throughout the essay. Graham Hill tries to make an

argument in his that having many materialistic things will not make you happy. However, his
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viewpoint is coming from a very narrow perspective. He does not realize that most of his

audience is the general public and that the majority of them come nowhere close to the wealth he

is talking about. This can prove damaging if the point he is trying to get across is that

materialistic things and money won’t make you happy. Hill’s essay is in first person and for the

part most of the essay is a narrative. Although generally telling a story is a good way to engage

the audience and their emotions it was not effective here. One reason is because his experience is

different from the experiences of others. An example of this is when Hill tries to gain sympathy

from the audience for having to take care of two lavish homes in different places which was

apparently very hard to do. “It got worse. Soon after we sold our company, I moved east...where

I rented a 1,900-square-foot SoHo Loft...which took more time and energy to manage...I still had

the Seattle house so I found myself worrying about two homes” (Hill, 309). The audience will

see this narrative in a different type of tone, they will see this as him complaining for what he

has. Even though Hill is expecting sympathy from the audience the manner he tried to install

sympathy won’t work because of his complaining tone. Most people don’t have to lavish homes

in different places. Therefore it's hard to sympathize with a man who is complaining that he has a

lot of wealth.

On the other hand Lyubomirsky uses personal accounts from other people talking about

their experiences with happiness and hardship. Her personal accounts relate more with common

people than Hill’s. Since one of the main points of her essay is to make people realize that no

matter the circumstances or even genetics, up to 40% of your happiness is reliant on you

(Lyubomirsky, 195). To employ pathos effectively she tells two stories of people who had been

through extraordinary hardships and are resiliently happy and another one of a girl who had a
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normal childhood but was very unhappy. She uses these narratives to engage the audience with

the text. If things are put into stories the audience will most likely put more attention. The stories

drew the curiosity and sympathy of the audience while the stories also informed them of what the

article was going to talk about. For example “Angela is currently a single mother. Things are

hard financially. (but) Angela also has an infectious sense of humor, and… she laughs about her

troubles” (Lyubomirsky, 180). This brings creates sympathy, engages the audience, and tells

them exactly what to expect in Lyubomirsky argument. The audience already gets an idea that

she is going to talk about how circumstances do not affect happiness. Also apart from personal

accounts from ordinary people to help people relate to her argument she also includes a

happiness survey so the people themselves are engaged in studying their own happiness

(Lyubomirsky, 183). This is where the audience saw how the article related to them depending

on the results of the quiz. This brings out curiosity from the audience about their happiness levels

and since it brings out emotion and curiosity this considered a pathos strategy. Hill relied more

on pathos to convey his argument however that back-fired because the type of sympathy he was

trying to get did not match his tone. Instead Hill managed to sound very conceited and ungrateful

by almost complaining that he had too many possessions (Hill, 309). Lyubomirsky however

maintained a professional tone and tried to make the essay relatable as possible to everyone.

Therefore, the pathos strategy she used to invoke sympathy and engage the audience was more

effective.

To show that an author's claim is credible often authors get outside sources that support

their claim. Lyubomirsky does this better than David Brooks in his essay because she used

university accredited studies that supported her claims. Meanwhile David Brooks just used real
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life situations that happened but were not actually studied such as the suffering that FDR went

through that made him more empathetic (Brooks, 284). One example of Lyubomirsky using a

credible study from the University of Minnesota to support her point is the twin studies that

Lyubomirsky includes in her essay to explain the genetic component of how happiness is

developed (Lyubomirsky, 187). She also uses the study University of Wisconsin-Madison study

electrodes and how they contribute to happiness (Lyubomirsky, 193). Hill, however, also uses

many supporting journal articles such as a UCLA study and Natural Resources Defense Council

Reports. The UCLA study called “Life at Home in the 21st Century” does give his argument

valid points like how the average size of the houses were 983 square feet in 1950 and by 2011

houses on average were 2,480 square feet (Hill, 310). Again however this does not apply to all

people or even the majority. For examples like me whose house is smaller than the average in the

1950s (my house is 822 square feet). Also the Natural Resources Defense Council reports give

information on how much food we waste and how that man-made things are causing climate

change. He goes on to explain things that are happening world wide because of climate change

such as the arctic sea ice melting (Hill, 310). However that hardly has anything to do with his

argument that having fewer materialistic things will make you happier. Meanwhile Lyubomirsky

uses the studies to prove that there is a genetic component in happiness as she describes but then

builds on that to say how that doesn’t automatically guarantee happiness she says using her own

expertise that its also up to you by at least 40% (Lyubomirsky, 195-196).

What is different from Lyubomirsky’s argument to the other articles in terms of evidence

(or Logos) is that she conducts her own qualitative data study and she included three interviews

in her essay that were the most significant to the study. She used this to first introduce the topic
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then brought in other studies that fit into what she found in her study. For example, she was

studying how circumstances did not always define the happiness level of a person. Then she

added the genetic studies to explain to her audience of most likely that was. She built on that

genetic component of happiness by explaining the set point, the twin studies, and then the

electrodes study. However the other authors such as Brooks only used real life situations that

had never been officially studied by professionals like the suffering that FDR went through that

made him more empathetic (Brooks, 284). Hill is the one that used more studies but as

mentioned above only the UCLA study added meaning to his argument while the other ones such

as the Natural Resources Defense Council reports didn’t really connect to happiness (Hill, 310).

The author included that to push his own personal agenda about alerting people about climate

change. While Lyubomirsky uses her studies more effectively as seen in this line of her

explaining the study “The identical twins were extremely similar to each other in their happiness

scores and remarkably the similarity was no smaller than the twins raised apart!” (Lyubomirsky,

189). This evidence ties in perfectly with her point that 50% of happiness is a set point or in

other words genetic. It proves her claim that happiness has a lot to do with genetics. Therefore

Lyubomirsky is more effective because she adds a deeper understanding of the topic she is

talking about and enriches the information even more by adding university accredited studies.

Lyubomirsky, Brooks, and Hill are all good writers, however, Lyubomirsky is a better

writer because of the rhetorical strategies being used more effectively in her essay. The

narratives are more relatable than the personal experience that Hill used in his essay. Also

Lyubomirsky uses something unique to the other three and that is that she explains the results of
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her own study. None of the other authors conducted their own study on happiness. Lyubomirsky

was therefore the most effective in all three strategies of ethos, pathos, and logos.
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Works Cited

Brooks, David. “What Suffering Does.” Pursuing Happiness, edited by Matthew Parfitt, Bedford St.

Martin’s, 2016, pp. 284-287.

Hill, Graham. “Living with Less. A Lot Less.” Pursuing Happiness, edited by Matthew Parfitt,

Bedford St. Martin’s, 2016, pp. 308-313.

Lyubomirsky, Sonja. “How Happy Are You and Why?” Pursuing Happiness, edited by Matthew

Parfitt,Bedford St. Martin’s, 2016, pp.179-197.