Maldonado 1

Jaden Maldonado

Professor McCann

English 1301.129

17 November 2023

Understanding the Use of Ethos, Logos, and Pathos

To begin with, from essay 1, I learned how to understand members in a community. This

helped me understand what these students were like in academic institutions. For example,

students in Bangladesh have different lives at school compared to Americans. However, learning

this skill from essay 1, I was able to relate to the students to a certain degree. From essay 2, I was

able to incorporate finding the deeper meaning for the smaller things. For instance, author

Chowdhury uses strong language to show something would have a bigger impact on the audience

than something else. This allowed me to find stronger examples to use for pathos.

Moreover, the analysis of this peer-reviewed journal has helped improve my writing

abilities. This article opened my eyes to many new ways to write an essay. For example, the

article uses emotion in most of the text. When I first read the article, it moved me in a way that I

wanted to do something about bullying that was happening in schools. The use of strong

emotions made me realize that I should try to put it in my essays to make my points stronger

overall.

Furthermore, the feedback I got from my peers helped me understand what I still needed

to work on. For example, one of the weaknesses that they gave me was that I was not giving

enough analysis of the article and instead was arguing the point alongside the author. This
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weakness is different from the ones I had in essay 1 and 2 because I struggled to see what the

author was trying to do with the rhetorical devices.

Moreover, I believe that the comments will be close to the same for all three essays. I

have been improving my writing all year; however, my writing has not changed drastically. For

example, all three essays used the same thought process even though they were different topics.

Additionally, the hardest part of this essay was finding an article and topic to write about.

There were over thousands of articles and topics to choose from. For example, I wanted to do the

effects of PTSD on veterans; however, there were over ten thousand articles to choose from.

Finding the right topic and article took me close to a week to figure it out. The least challenging

part of the essay was the formatting of the essay itself. To illustrate, the article was set up as

ethos in the first couple of pages, then used both pathos and logos for the rest of the article. This

made formatting my essay easy because I did not have to struggle to look for the different types

of examples of each rhetorical device.

In addition, I learned from essay 3 how to find good examples of ethos, pathos, and

logos. This is helpful in other courses because it allows me to make more persuasive essays. For

example, in U.S history, I had to write a position paper on the New Deal that was proposed by

President FDR. Using pathos and logos in this essay could have made my essay more persuasive

toward my opinion on the topic.

On the other hand, I will not be able to use the skills I needed in essay 3 to find topics

that interested me when writing in different classes. For instance, in physics, the teacher gave the

class a writing assignment that had to deal specifically with physics, and we could not choose
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any other type of science. This shows that in most classes I will not be writing about topics that

interest me and instead write about what the teacher gave me.

In conclusion, this essay changed my identity as a writer because of the use of rhetorical

devices. These rhetorical devices will shape most of my essay in the future. For example, with

the help of the article, I realized that these rhetorical devices can make readers side more with the

option that is being emphasized more with the use of emotions, statistics, and credibility.