Rhetorical Analyses - Essay Example

Rhetorical Analysis of Featherstone’s View of Current Reading Materials for Girls Kevon Jones English 1120 Jessica Mann July 24, Featherstone’s View of Current Reading Materials for Girls Featherstone criticizes magazines targeted for teenage girls such as Jump, Teen People, Twist and Glossy that packaged as manifesting ‘realness’ when the choice of choice of illustrations, articles and themes showed antithetical results. Featherstone uses her personal perspectives, feelings and thoughts to influence readers into deciding which magazines are most appropriate for the demographical group.

The author used emotionally packed terms that aim to persuade girls into realizing which magazines are designed to lure them despite lack of significant contents. To provide a balanced discourse, Featherstone eventually evaluated magazines such as Blue Jean, Teen Voices, Hues and Reluctant Hero that were certified to provide more substantial contents. The rhetorical analysis hereby aims to evaluate Featherstone’s effectiveness in evaluating the magazines using appeals to ethos, logos, and pathos.

The author’s arguments clearly indicated her preferences for the teen girls’ reading materials through provision of examples and citing relevant support from identified slogans, celebrities, and choice of feature articles that were believed to evoke the readers’ emotional response. For example, Featherstone’s assessment of Teen People’s strategies of using celebrities such as Jennifer Love Hewitt by focusing on the actress’ clothes and love life, instead of providing positive information, aim to make readers realize the lack of credible and substantial content that could improve knowledge of girls on more crucial matters.

Her choices of vocabularies, though, swerve from easy to read to confusing and almost defying logical order – which is contrary to using appeals to pathos. The paragraph that aimed to describe Blue Jean, for instance, started with a logical description of the magazine but proceeded with the second sentence composed of 86 words confusing the reader on what really was the message about. Overall, Featherstone’s appeal to use logos was commendable through appropriate use of analogies, quotations and citations to provide illustrations and examples to prove her points.

By initially presenting arguments against the magazines Jump, Teen People, Twist and Glossy, Featherstone clearly provided contentions that indicate the insufficiency of substantial contents of these magazines which only focus on trivial love lives of celebrities (Teen People), promoting quick drying nail polishes (Jump) and boosting body images of known skinny actresses in the likes of Jennifer Aniston and Neve Campbell (Twist). By providing ample facts and illustrations, the author eventually argued on the marked advantages of reading Blue Jean, Teen Voices, Hues and Reluctant Hero due to the magazines’ ability to present diverse crucial topics such as politics, book reviews, personal stuff, with fiction and poetry (Teen Voices), attractive lay-out and contains various articles of women’s experiences of diverse cultural orientations (Hues), and clearly significant articles such as sexual harassment, peer mediation, among others (Reluctant Hero).

The structure of presenting one argument logically after the other makes appeal to logos effective. The development of ethos was fairly achieved since she openly lambasted the first set of magazines over the other set and therefore waived a fair-minded presentation. A rhetorical analysis that appeals to ethos should substantiate the author’s credibility by providing a balanced discourse and leaving the readers to decide which magazines are more preferred than others. Her statements that state: “these magazines are so good that reading them actually made me dislike Jump, Teen People and Twist even more” highlighted her use of emotions to persuade the readers to read what she prefers.

The eminent bias relayed by the author makes appeal to ethos only fairly effective. Finally, the appeal to the readers’ emotions was successfully attained through vivid and emotionally packed language with figurative and connotative meanings: “talk to the hand; strived-after tresses shown are, you guessed it, blonde; Twist’s idea of reader participation is – no joke – a “love quiz” contest; Teen People is reportedly selling like the Titanic. The choice of language, vocabulary and examples that make the readers react enhance the author’s arguments and therefore, the appeal to pathos is effective.

The result effectively relayed to her audience the preferential reading materials deemed to be read by girls. Reference Featherstone, L. (July 2011). Writing Today: Chapter 9: Rhetorical Analysis. Pp. 189 – 191.