Short Assignment 1

In Studs Terkel’s “Community in Action”, he makes the point that humans fare better when they are together and it is natural and orderly to do so. By appealing to the ethos and the pathos of the audience, the author’s claim is validated through a personal anecdote.

Terkel was raised during the Great Depression and saw how communities banded together for the less fortunate. With a vivid description of the community helping a less fortunate family, the author goes on to create an epideictic argument in regards why a community in action should be the ultimate goal for each generation. When Selzer writes about the effect of personal experience in an author’s work, he demonstrates that it can help the audience not see when an author is being deliberative. However Terkel is not being as deliberative as he is being epideictic and appealing to the readers to try and always be a community. The first distinct movement that Terkel makes is when he relays Einstein’s opinion in regards to Westerners and their individualistic thinking. The audience is pulled back into the side of Terkel when he uses strong rhetoric about what the people of the, “'30s and '40s and the Depression, fighting for rights of laborers and the rights of women and the rights of all people who are different from the majority”. This passage resonates proudly with the audience, as they are Americans reading about what makes and American life, and in turn it appeals to their ethos and nationalism.

There is no restraint in what Terkel is saying to the audience, he does not entertain other schools of thought in individualism. He goes against the notions that being a part of something means a ‘loss of freedom’. However, he expects nothing from the audience; he does not use a forceful tone about what his belief is. Terkel just wants the audience to understand his story and what it means to be a community. The mention of the plumber, carpenter, and electrician as banding together, he paints a picture the audience can only hope they would one day see. His appeal to their pathos is used distinctly through this anecdote; in a way it is what puts the article in perspective. Terkel does it in the very beginning showing that there are no twists and turns, and what he believes is being state explicitly.

When one is presenting their belief or opinion the audience needs something that they can grasp for and relate too, the ethos or pathos as one could put it as. The audience feels no pressure to feel the same way as Terkel but he does compel their thoughts through his story, which demonstrates how his rhetoric is epideictic in the way Selzak portrays it.