The target audience of the article The Creative Process is people of color.

The author of

this article is James Baldwin. The argument that James Baldwin made is to look back at your

past and reconcile with it to move beyond. He used many rhetorical moves in his writing, such as

metaphor, imagery, ethos, paradox, and a call to action.

In the first paragraph, Baldwin used imagery when he wrote, "There are, forever, swamps

to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed. None of these things

can be done alone. But the conquest of the physical world is not man's only duty." Using imagery

at the beginning of the article will grab the reader's attention, and when they read further, it is

easy for readers to believe his argument. In the second paragraph, Baldwin used a paradox by

writing, "I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. But

the barrier between oneself and one's knowledge of oneself is high indeed." This sentence says

we know, but we don't want to know, which is an example of paradox because know and don't

know are antonyms. This move helps the reader understand the fact without saying the exact

word, which will be easier for the reader to accept. In the third paragraph, he used metaphor,

writing that "The entire purpose of the society is to create a bulwark against the inner and the

outer chaos, to make life bearable and to keep the human race alive." He used a metaphor to

describe society as a fortress in a war. Similar to imagery, metaphors make an argumentative

article more entertaining and engage the reader as well as helping the reader better understand

and visualize Baldwin's argument. In the last paragraph, he used ethos when writing, "The

dangers of being an American artist are not greater than those of being an artist anywhere else in

the world, but they are very particular." This use of ethos is effective because he establishes

himself as an artist and then further supports that credibility by describing what it's like to be an

artist. Now that the readers trust him, he can make his argument, and they are more likely to
believe him. He also used the call to action in this sentence "I think, we do. We are the strongest

nation in the Western world, but this is not for the reasons that we think. It is because we have an

opportunity that no other nation has in moving beyond the Old World concepts of race and class

and caste, to create, finally, what we must have had in mind when we first began speaking of the

New World." This call to action brings relevancy to his argument. He gives his readers

something to think about and do after reading the article, making his argument effective beyond

the short essay.

The genre James Baldwin chose is persuasive writing. This genre most effectively

portrays his message of looking and dealing with the past as a way to move on. Persuasive

writing has clear logic and reason to build up and reinforce an argument. In the short essay, he

describes our current society and how the future is going to be. He uses facts to build up his

argument, which he stated at the end. The article's logic is clear; in each paragraph, he connects it

back to the main idea about moving on from the past and using examples of events that happened

in real life to prove the idea.