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Rhetorical Devices In The Quiet Alarm

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Over the course of the month we have studied Eli Hager’s “For men in prison child support becomes a crushing debt”, Dana Rorabacher’s “My fellow conservatives should protect medical marijuana”, and Andreas Elpidorou’s “The quiet alarm”. Individual claims, audiences, and appeals vary drastically throughout the texts, but as we break them down we begin to uncover similarities between the trio. This analysis will expose techniques, strategies, and evidence while discovering the rhetorical appeals behind each one.
The beginning of any thought provoking essay will hook its audience using a form of pathos. “Two of his sons returned home from the battlefield whole and healthy. The third, however, came home suffering multiple seizures a day”-(Rorabacher). The quote generates sympathy within us making us yearn to see a welcoming outcome and leaving the audience hooked. Eli Hager’s article follows a similar route informing us that “The state of Missouri sent Harris to the penitentiary in Boonvilee, 250 miles from his home and baby daughter”-(Hager). Again we sympathize with the loss of a family, but not all of the articles used grievance to hook us. In the “Quiet Alarm” the audience is informed of a vaudeville performer who performed deadly stunts involving hatchets, pins, and guns on himself to generate shockwaves in the audience. From these examples we identify how our emotions lure us into these texts.
Compelling facts are another technique each of the authors rely on.
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