Analysis Of Margaret Miller's The Privileges Of The Parents

The Privileges of the Parents Margaret Miller article “The Privileges of the Parents” invalidates Paul Barton and Anthony Carnevale main ideas from their articles. Barton and Carnevale focus on the benefits that accrue to individuals from having a college education. Miller’s purpose focuses on the fact that children who have highly educated parents are more likely to have a bigger vocabulary or superior critical thinking skills than children who has parents with just a high school degree. Miller uses the rhetorical triangle which includes logic, emotion, and the writer. It can further be broken down into fallacies, tone, evidence, and authority. She presents an argument through her style, tone, and evidence that the more highly educated the parents, the higher the grades of their children. Miller uses parts of the rhetorical triangle; her article has more logical appeal. Miller uses the logical appeal by presenting evidence persuasively throughout her article. For example, she highlighted a chart produced by Tom Mortenson which shows the correlation between parental education and children’s grades. “60.6 percent of children whose

Her tone is dependent on her audience. Miller’s audience consists of children and their parents. Since half of her audience are children she speaks with a respectful tone and her word choices plays a part in her tone as well. Throughout the article, Miller considers her audience frequently. For example, she claims that educated parents fight for their kids in high school and they know what privileges to fight for. Parents also hover over their college-going children, according to a National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) this causes a remarkably effect on their children’s engagement and success (629). However, a few of her audience will most likely disagree because not every parent who has read her article had an education higher than a high school