Examples may be used as support in all types of arguments. For examples to be believable and convincing, they must be representative (typical of all the relevant examples you might have chosen), consistent with the experience of your readers (familiar to them and not extreme), and adequate in number (numerous enough to be convincing and yet not likely to overwhelm readers).
Kozol presents several examples to support his argument that the human costs of illiteracy are high.
The following illustration comes from a book on illiteracy in America by Jonathan Kozol, a prominent educator and writer:
Illiterates cannot read the menu in a restaurant.
They cannot read the cost of items on the menu in the window of the restaurant before they enter.
Illiterates cannot read the letters that their children bring home from their teachers. They cannot study school department circulars that tell them of the courses that their children must be taking if they hope to pass the SAT exams. They cannot help with homework. They cannot write a letter to the teacher. They are afraid to visit in the classroom. They do not want to humiliate their child or themselves.
Illiterates cannot read instructions on a bottle of prescription medicine. They cannot find out when a medicine is past the year of safe consumption; nor can they read of allergenic risks, warnings to diabetics, or the potential sedative effect of certain kinds of nonprescription pills. They cannot observe preventive health care admonitions. They cannot read about “the seven warning signs of cancer” or the indications of blood-sugar fluctuations or the risks of eating certain foods that aggravate the likelihood of cardiac arrest.
—JONATHAN KOZOL, Illiterate America
Kozol collected these examples in his many interviews with people who could neither read nor write. Though all of his readers are literate and have presumably never experienced the frustrations of adult illiterates, Kozol assumes they will accept that the experiences are a familiar part of illiterates’ lives. Most readers will believe the experiences to be neither atypical nor extreme.
Identify the examples in paragraphs 9 and 11 in Jessica Statsky’s essay “Children Need to Play, Not Compete” and paragraphs 16–18 in Amitai Etzioni’s essay “Working at McDonald’s” (both in Chapter 6). If you have not read the essays, pause to skim them so that you can evaluate these examples within the context of the entire essay. How well do the examples meet the standards of representativeness, consistency with experience of readers, and adequacy in number? You will not have all the information you need to evaluate the examples—you rarely do unless you are an expert on the subject—but make a judgment based on the information available to you in the headnotes and the essays.