In society, today many movies have a certain depiction of lack of poverty, usually between a single woman and her children. Women are usually the ones who are supposed to be dependent on the male figure in the household, but when one is not present, she must help her children and her alone. I have chosen to do a rhetorical analysis on the movie “Erin Brockovich” because being in poverty is one of the social issues present. This movie was released in 200, but the true-story occurred during the early 90’s. Poverty being the social issue started from Erin having a lack of education and unemployment. The movie begins with Julia Roberts, Erin Brockovich, who is a single mother with 3 children gets into a car accident that was not her fault. She became injured in the accident and wants to sue the doctor who ran into her. She ends up hiring an attorney, Ed Masry, and they go to court to try and win their case, but they …show more content…
After the case closes he will not return her calls and she goes to the law firm and confronts him. Things did not work out for her and she needs a job now. She gets the job and immediately she receives files on a real-estate case that says the Pacific Gas and Eletric Company offering to buy a home owned by Donna Jensen, who is a resident of the county in California. She ends up reading all of Donna’s medical files and goes to meet and talk with her about what is going on. Donna tells Erin about the chromium which is what the power plant uses. Erin begins digging into the case more and finds evidence that the groundwater in Hinkley county is seriously contaminated with carcinogenic hexavalent chromium, but PG&E Pacific Gas and Electric) has been telling Hinkley county residents that they use a safer form of chromium. Ed ends up firing her from not being at the office, until he finds out what she has been doing. The chromium in the water
Kenny and Claire Sparks are a working-class couple living in Dayton, Texas. The Sparks have been trying to have a child for seven years, when they finally conceive, Claire automatically knows she is having a boy and names him Landon. On October 23rd 1988 when Claire was just six months pregnant when she started bleeding causing Landon to be born ten weeks early and weigh only 3lbs 5oz. Kenny visits Landon before he is airlifted to Hermann hospital when he notices a mass on his spine and know his son will not survive. Kenny is told about the life Landon will have if he survived the 2 pronged surgeries which given the severity of the lesion would be lifeless and bedridden anyway.
Have you ever seen innocent kids and disappointed parents crying in front of happy smile of other families? That sad image is usually caught in the lottery of any charter school. Ted Cruz said in School Choice Week “ And yet, there are millions of kids in the waiting list for charter school. We should not put our future in the wait list.”
In preparation for this paper I chose to read Fire in the ashes: twenty five years among the poorest children in America by Jonathan Kozol. In this book Kozol has followed these children and their family’s lives for the past twenty five years. In his writing Kozol portrays a point of view most from his background and standing would not be capable of having. He portrays what life is like for those who have been let down by the system that was meant to protect them. Kozols writing style can be very blunt at times, not for shock value, but for the sake of portraying these children’s realities, and not sugarcoating the inequalities that they are faced with.
Class Stereotypes Stereotypes are seen as overgeneralized ideas, images, or beliefs of a person based on a group of people. Stereotypes can either be taken or said in a negative or positive way but mostly seen in a negative way. Stereotypes are formed on a life experience, idea or a belief a person may have towards one person based on the person’s gender, race, religion or social class. The most common stereotypes are of the social classes which are the: upper, middle and lower class.
The film documentary Paris is Burning is a complex film portraying the lives of African American men who are gay and transgender. The characters are Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Venus Xtravaganza, Willi Ninja, Octavia St. Laurent, Freddie Pendavis, and several others. This film focuses on how these men support each other and find happiness by embracing their culture. The film uses rhetorical strategies, such as pathos to allow the audience to respond emotionally, logos because this is a documentary about the lives of real men who are rejected by society, and ethos the integrity of this film comes from the whole film crew and the director Jennie Livingston who is openly lesbian (Clark). Livingston made a film that showed the audience a community that has its own cultural norms who are outlawed by everyone but themselves.
Johnnie Cochran's closing argument during the O.J Simpson uses all three rhetorical appeals to try and convince the jury of O.J Simpson's innocence. To begin with, he uses Ethos by bring up a quote by Frederick Douglas that discusses the equality of all men and implying that if they vote O.J Simpson guilty it would be unethical because of his race. Next he appeals to pathos by using the statement "We haven't reached this goal yet, but certainly in this great county of ours, we're trying" to give a sense of both disappointment and pride first by showing that we haven't overcome discrimination yet but then that we still live in a great place that is striving.
I viewed Frontline a documentary series, which episode was entitled Poor Kids. The frontline personnel spent time with three children Kailey, Johnny, and Britany along with their families as they all struggle financially. We perceive a glimpse of what it is like to live below the poverty line in America through a child’s eyes. While observing the documentary, I became consciously aware that children who are considered poor or living below the poverty line were more mindful of the responsibilities of life. The children were worrisome of the lack of employment for their parents, bills, and in Britney’s case; how they would accommodate their way of living to support a new addition to the family.
People in poverty are generally portrayed as worthless and this is because culture today illustrates a man’s worth from how materially successful they are. Hooks explains how this kind of representation of the poor can mentally and emotionally handicap and entire society of people in poverty. She goes into an example of how a
In Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger appeals to his audience’s sense of emotions in order to persuade his readers that the obsession with high school football negatively affects everyone’s future in Odessa, Texas. Bissinger relies on emotional appeals by employing devices and techniques to present individuals’ personal stories and experiences. His searing portrayal of Odessa, and its Permian High School football team, exposes the side of sports that severely impacts the people living in this society. Bissinger shows the long term consequences of this delusion on the people who are directly and indirectly associated with Permian football. This demonstrate how detrimental the burdens are for the children, which touches the reader’s heart.
The American dream is a dream of a land in which one can prosper with ambition and hard work. This idea has created many illusions for some because in reality the American dream is proven to be something that is rarely achieved. No individual is guaranteed success or destined for failure, but it is apparent that women, people of color, and those born into poverty will face greater obstacles than others, despite being a greater part of the American population. An author that tackles the issue of class in the United States is Gregory Mantsios. In his essay, “Class in America-2009”, Mantsios aims to prove that class affects people’s lives in drastic ways.
Argumentative Text Essay In the book Nickel and Dimed, written by Barbara Ehrenreich, the author argues how challenging it is to live in a life of poverty. To prove to herself as well as others that this statement is accurate, she makes the decision to experience this lifestyle firsthand by taking low-wage jobs and recording the results. Ehrenreich took on jobs including a maid service, waitressing, and assisting the nursing home to make enough money for a place to sleep and food to eat. The work’s central argument is the fact that minimum and low wage workers face a myriad of difficulties in getting by in America; they receive very low pay, harsh treatments from their employers, and the inability to have an actual life.
Jack Nguyen AP English 3 30, July 2015 Nickel and Dimed Rhetorical Strategies and Notes Thesis: Ehrenreich’s personal use of varied rhetorical strategies allowed her to divulge the working conditions and struggles of the poverty-stricken class to the readers in order to provoke them to realize that something has to be done about poverty.. First Body: What: Allusion Pg. 2, Logos Pg. 37. How & Effect: Ehrenreich uses these personal, rhetorical strategies based on her experiences as a low-wage worker in the poor working class. The effect is that Ehrenreich is able to show the readers the conditions in which the impoverished work in and the daily obstacles that they face in life; also there is an appeal to logic and a reference of a poverty idiom. Why: Ehrenreich is deliberately using these rhetorical strategies to incite the readers about the fact that changes need to be done to poverty because it is a detrimental thing to society.
In the passage “What is poverty?”, the author Jo Goodwin Parker, describes a variety of things that she considers to portray the poverty in which she lives in. She seems to do this through her use of first-person point of view to deliver a view of poverty created by a focused use of rhetorical questions, metaphors, imagery, and repetition to fill her audience with a sense of empathy towards the poor. The author’s use of first person point of view creates the effect of knowing exactly what she is feeling. “The baby and I suffered on. I have to decide every day if I can bear to put my cracked hands into the cold water and strong soap.”
Twelve Angry Men is in many ways a love letter to the American legal justice system. We find here eleven men, swayed to conclusions by prejudices, past experience, and short-sightedness, challenged by one man who holds himself and his peers to a higher standard of justice, demanding that this marginalized member of society be given his due process. We see the jurors struggle between the two, seemingly conflicting, purposes of a jury, to punish the guilty and to protect the innocent. It proves, however, that the logic of the American trial-by-jury system does work.
People say a picture is worth a thousand words. Just about every picture has rhetorical elements incorporated into their design. In this case, the well-crafted poster for Steven Spielberg’s film, Jaws, implements the use of ethos, pathos and logos in an attempt to get its audience to see the film. The poster for jaws is very effective at gaining the audience’s attention through the use of graphic pictures.