Rhetorical Analysis Of Too Poor To Make The News By Barbara Ehrenreich

As a reader reads Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed on (Not) Getting by in America, they get an insight on what it is like to live a low income life. Ehrenreich proposes the argument in the introduction that poverty is a serious matter and just because one has a job does not mean they are not considered poor. She wants to persuade us to realize that American is not the land of opportunity as promised and portrayed and there are regular people who are struggling to live a comfortable life. Throughout her book she mentions her experiences with living on minimum wage, the hiring process, and how she felt being put in that position. After reading Ehrenreich’s book I am thoroughly persuaded.

The working poor do not have themselves to blame for their failure to get a job, according to the author of Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich. Despite going to college, getting career coaches, and having experience, Ehrenreich said that people still have trouble getting jobs in today’s society, which she explores in her book, Bait and Switch. Ehrenreich spoke Tuesday at Ken’s Bookshop in Alma about her new book and the research she did for it. In addition, she spoke out about economic hardships and ways we can make it easier to help the working poor.

No Nickels or Dimes To Spare In the book, Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich writes the story, “Serving in Florida.” She describes her experience living as an undercover waitress when in reality she’s a journalist for culture and politics with a doctorate in biology. Ehrenreich experiences trying to survive on multiple low income jobs to understand what it is like to be in their shoes instead of being apart of the higher middle class.

In her essay “Serving in Florida” Barbara Ehrenreich states that the minimum wage is not enough to support a person. The evidence that she uses is very convincing for me she mentions various examples of how hard she had to work, in order to afford for her rent. Ehrenreich mentions that she had to work two jobs one as a waitress and the other one as housekeeping in the essay she describes how hard it was to run from one job and not being regarded with anything. I believe that the author wants to make the audience to analyze and make conscious about the situation and the world where we lived

One of the best-selling authors, Barbara Ehrenreich, in her narrative essay, “Serving in Florida,” describes her personal experience working in a local restaurant called Jerry’s. Ehrenreich’s purpose is to attach importance to the low-wage America workplace. Using rhetorical strategies such as negative diction, simile, images, and pathos, Ehrenreich attempts to raise public awareness of the low-wage workers’ life in her readers. Firstly, Barbara Ehrenreich exploits connotation of words and simile to emphasize the difficult life of the lower class.

Thesis: I believe that Ehrenreich’s thesis is that no matter how hard you work or how chipper you act, it is nearly impossible to make a living for oneself in minimum wage conditions such as those of her coworkers. Narration: Narration is present on page 765 where through the narrator we are told Gail’s story about how her husband died and her what has led up to her current situation. Report: Paragraph 2 is an example of report writing where she details the types of housing in the area and the possible houses she can afford because she is being illustrative and informational about the topic of real estate in Key West. Analysis: The section on pages 771-772 is an analysis because she is breaking down the housing situations of her coworkers based upon her prediction of their salaries.

Rhetorical Analysis: Richer and Poorer In the essay “Richer and Poorer” written by Jill Lepore and published in the New Yorker in March 16, 2015. She argues how the united states has the largest economic inequality in the world and how it’s been going on for years. The audience they are pursuing for this paper are those who are either well educated, those who are updated in recent political regimes, and those who must stomach economic inequality. Ms. Lepore states evidence amidst other authors, stories, and numbers based on research from the Gini Index, which is amongst other parts throughout their paper.

In the essay “Richer and Poorer, Accounting for Inequality”, published on March 16, 2015, The New Yorker, Jill Lepore presents details proving the inequality in the United States. She references several materials like Robert Putnam’s book “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis”, “Inequality: What Can Be Done?” by Anthony Atkinson, Steve Frazer’s “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power”. She has also done other research about Gini’s index that represents the lack of equality in America through numbers. The author focuses on stories that can well describe the ugly picture of citizens in the country who don’t have the privilege for a better life and opportunities that the richer class gets to enjoy.

In the article, “The Rise of the New Groupthink,” Susan Cain argues that new groupthink conveys a workplace with group thinking, acquiring underdone work and no individualism. Publication date for this article is January 13th, 2012 and the she targets the audience of workplaces. Cain addresses a tone of open-mindedness in this article with this topic of the new groupthink, while also emphasizing the negatives of the new groupthink. The article adheres to the classical argumentative structure in many paragraphs. For example, the author secures the audience’s attention by opening with a statement saying that individualism is dead.

“Serving in Florida” is a piece of literature that comes from Nickel and Dimed, written by Barbara Ehrenreich that discusses her experience in as an undercover journalist trying to live a life working low-paying jobs. In 1941, Barbara Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, a blue-collar mining town where her father used to work before he earned a degree in the Butte School of Mines and moved the family. Ehrenreich became a part of a middle-class family and attended Rockefeller University where she graduated with a doctorate in biology. However, throughout the years she became more involved with politics, such as advocating for the women’s health movement in the 1970’s and wrote Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. Eventually, she quit her teaching job at State University to become a full-time writer to create pieces relating to the

Minimum wage has always been a difficult topic to talk about in political situations with questions about increasing or decreasing it forever on the ballot. In today’s economic state there has been an increase of the minimum wage in several states such as California; which has caused a debate on the national level of how much the lower class can live on. In Barbara Ehrenreich’s book she tries out low wage living and documents it in Nickel and Dimed, in her opinion it's barely possible to survive on low wages for even one person. To show this she employs conversational and concrete diction to show the difficulties of living two lives that are at different poles of the economic scale and the ignorance of both classes to those besides themselves with a confusion of audiences.

In the selection, “Serving in Florida”, Barbara Ehrenreich described her experience of working at the low-wage American workplace and the worker’s struggles with minimum wage. When she depicts the work as an outsider, she states “customers arrive in human waves, sometimes disgorged fifty at a time from their tour buses, peckish and whiny.” (Ehrenreich 395) It demonstrates the hardships of the workers when dealing with customers. Even though the customers are complaining for no reasons and being obnoxious, the workers have to deal with them with respect.

America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. This phrase is sung with pride and passion by American citizens. However, some of America’s hardest working citizens are shackled down by a factor that they have no control over. Poverty, is what’s keeping citizens imprisoned while they should be living free. An appalling 44 percent of homeless Americans are employed (http://nationalhomeless.org/).

In Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich uses precise language to paint a picture of Holly, an underprivileged woman working at The Maids. While working at The Maids, Ehrenreich provides the audience with numerous descriptions and characteristics of Holly. First off, Holly is a twenty-three year old who feeds not only herself, but also her husband and an elderly relative; astonishingly, she manages to do so with a salary of thirty to fifty dollars per week. Specifically, Ehrenreich writes, “She is visibly unwell-possibly whiter, on a daily basis than anyone else in the state… think bridal gowns, tuberculosis, and death” (Ehrenreich 95). Furthermore, the author describes Holly’s meager eating habits by asserting,