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You must read each slide, and complete any questions on the slide, in sequence.
A Practice Sequence: Appealing to Ethos and Pathos

Think about the language and strategies the writers use in the following passages to connect with their audience, in particular their appeals to both ethos and pathos. After reading each excerpt, discuss who you think the implied audience is and whether you think the strategies the writers use to connect with their readers are effective or not. Use the space provided to answer each question. Click the “submit” button for each question to turn in your work. See Chapter 9, From Ethos to Logos: Appealing to Your Readers, Appealing to Pathos in your book.

1. Almost a half century after the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that Southern school segregation was unconstitutional and “inherently unequal,” new statistics from the 1998–99 school year show that segregation continued to intensify throughout the 1990s, a period in which there were three major Supreme Court decisions authorizing a return to segregated neighborhood schools and limiting the reach and duration of desegregation orders. For African American students, this trend is particularly apparent in the South, where most blacks live and where the 2000 Census shows a continuing return from the North. From 1988 to 1998, most of the progress of the previous two decades in increasing integration in the region was lost. The South is still much more integrated than it was before the civil rights revolution, but it is moving backward at an accelerating rate.
Gary Orfield, “Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation”.
A successful response to this question will consider the concepts reviewed in Chapter 9. Refer to Chapter 9, From Ethos to Logos: Appealing to Your Readers as you reflect on your response to this activity.
2. No issue has been more saturated with dishonesty than the issue of racial quotas and preferences, which is now being examined by the Supreme Court of the United States. Many defenders of affirmative action are not even honest enough to admit that they are talking about quotas and preferences, even though everyone knows that that is what affirmative action amounts to in practice.
Despite all the gushing about the mystical benefits of “diversity” in higher education, a recent study by respected academic scholars found that “college diversity programs fail to raise standards” and that “a majority of faculty members and administrators recognize this when speaking anonymously.”
This study by Stanley Rothman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Neil Nevitte found that “of those who think that preferences have some impact on academic standards those believing it negative exceed those believing it positive by 15 to 1.”
Poll after poll over the years has shown that most faculty members and most students are opposed to double standards in college admissions. Yet professors who will come out publicly and say what they say privately in these polls are as rare as hens’ teeth.
Such two-faced talk is pervasive in academia and elsewhere. A few years ago, in Berkeley, there was a big fight over whether a faculty vote on affirmative action would be by secret ballot or open vote. Both sides knew that the result of a secret ballot would be the direct opposite of the result in a public vote at a faculty meeting.
Thomas Sowell, “The Grand Fraud: Affirmative Action for Blacks”.
A successful response to this question will consider the concepts reviewed in Chapter 9. Refer to Chapter 9, From Ethos to Logos: Appealing to Your Readers as you reflect on your response to this activity.
3. When the judgment day comes for every high school student—that day when a final transcript is issued and sent to the finest institutions, with every sin of class selection written as with a burning chisel on stone—on that day a great cry will go up throughout the land, and there will be weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and considerable grumbling against guidance counselors, and the cry of a certain senior might be, “WHY did no one tell me that Introduction to Social Poker wasn’t a solid academic class?” At another, perhaps less wealthy school, a frustrated and under-nurtured sculptress will wonder, “Why can’t I read, and why don’t I care?” The reason for both of these oversights, as they may eventually discover, is that the idea of the elective course has been seriously mauled, mistreated, and abused under the current middle-class high school system. A significant amount of the blame for producing students who are stunted, both cognitively and morally, can be traced back to this pervasive fact. Elective courses, as shoddily planned and poorly funded as they may be, constitute the only formation that many students get in their own special types of intelligences. Following the model of Howard Gardner, these may be spatial, musical, or something else. A lack of stimulation to a student’s own intelligence directly causes a lack of identification with the intelligence of others. Instead of becoming moderately interested in a subject by noticing the pleasure other people receive from it, the student will be bitter, jealous, and without empathy. These are the common ingredients in many types of tragedy, violent or benign. Schools must take responsibility for speaking in some way to each of the general types of intelligences. Failure to do so will result in students who lack skills, and also the inspiration to comfort, admire, emulate, and aid their fellow humans.
“All tasks that really call upon the power of attention are interesting for the same reason and to an almost equal degree,” wrote Simone Weil in her Reflections on Love and Faith, her editor having defined attention as “a suspension of one’s own self as a center of the world and making oneself available to the reality of another being.” In Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, modern scientific theorist David Bohm describes “a holistic underlying implicate order whose information unfolds into the explicate order of particular fields.” Rilke’s euphemism for this “holistic...implicate order,” which Palmer borrows, is “the grace of great things.” Weil’s term would be “God.” However, both agree that eventual perception of this singular grace, or God, is accessible through education of a specific sort, and for both it is doubtless the most necessary experience of a lifetime. Realizing that this contention is raining down from different theorists, and keeping in mind that the most necessary experience of a lifetime should not be wholly irrelevant to the school system, educators should therefore reach the conclusion that this is a matter worth looking into. I assert that the most fruitful and practical results of their attention will be a wider range of electives coupled with a new acknowledgment and handling of them, one that treats each one seriously.
Erin Meyers, “The Educational Smorgasbord as Saving Grace”.
A successful response to this question will consider the concepts reviewed in Chapter 9. Refer to Chapter 9, From Ethos to Logos: Appealing to Your Readers as you reflect on your response to this activity.