Ethos, Logos, and Pathos in "Strangers" and “Love—You’re Doing it Wrong”

In Toni Morrison’s essay titled “Strangers” and Yann Dall’Aglio Ted Talk titled “Love—You’re Doing it Wrong”, they both use ethos and pathos. In “Strangers” by Toni Morrison, she uses ethos to make us believe that we are all “longing for and missing some aspects of [ourselves], and that there are no strangers” (138). Morrison wants her audience to believe that no one is a stranger and that there are bits of ourselves in each person we meet. Morrison uses pathos when she talks about how she felt when the fisherwoman never came back and Morrison asked around about her, she says she felt “cheated, puzzled, but also amused” (Morrison 136). Which brings wonder to her readers about whether the fisherwoman existed at all or not. In “Love—You’re Doing it Wrong” by Yann Dall’Aglio, he uses ethos because he wants us to believe that love is only when you value something or someone and it or they value you back. “I know this, that’s why love can be defined in a more accurate way as the desire of being desired” (Dall’Aglio). Dall’Aglio uses pathos when he says “Indeed, for the pick-up artists, falling in love with someone is a waste of time, it’s squandering your seduction capital, so it must be eliminated be eliminated like a disease, like an infection.” This is pathos because Dall’Aglio makes people feel like if they ever meet a pick-up artist that they will be cheated out of love because pick-up artists don’t like love.

Logos, Pathos, Ethos

In “Strangers”, by Toni Morrison and the TedTalk of “Love- You’re Doing It Wrong”, the rhetorical strategies of logos, ethos and pathos are used. In “Strangers”, the story of a woman who is seen once and disappears is told. When the man begins to think more of the woman after she leaves, the author uses pathos to show the reader the man’s thoughts and feelings. He begins to ask about her and wonder who she is and where she went, so pathos is used with the feeling of betrayal and confused. He feels betrayed because she just left with no reason or say, but also confused because he wants to know more of her starting with where she went. Logos is also used in “Strangers”, when he begins to think of her and why she might have left, and makes stories and thoughts of her, using inductive reasoning as to where she is and who she is. In “Love- You’re Doing It Wrong”, the speaker used pathos when he discusses how love is an amount of value and desire for someone, showing emotion to the crowd that love is a strong feeling and not just a word or action. The speaker of the TedTalk is also using ethos when he tells his audience of consumerism being materialism. He gives the thought of love being an action to show feelings for one person and uses multiple examples to get his point across, like the teenage boy buying new pants for his crush, not because he might actually need them . 

In the story “Sowers and Reapers” by Jamaica Kincaid, she writes about a man who had a friendly conversation with a woman fishing in his neighbors back yard and could not wait to see and talk to her again. Day after day goes by and he has not seen her once again. He asks his real neighbor if she had been back, but the neighbor had no idea what he was talking about. After it settled in his mind, he realized he made it up himself in his mind. The article “Love—you’re doing it wrong” this man, Yann Dall’Aglio, explains how you can love and have value in many things, it just depends on if they value you back to say it is actually love. The first story is a man imagining someone he would love to meet and have around, so he says he loves her. The article is saying when this object, or person values you back the way you value it, then this is love. The first story is a cute little love story affecting your emotional side, while the article is merely explaining his ideas and thoughts and feelings about how he believes love is shown. He is giving you his logic and knowledge about love in his mind. These two stories are indeed about love and the idea of love, but they are two different ideas, as in one story is appealing to your emotional side, and the other story is informational, appealing to your logical side.

Bla$é

In the Norton reader both, "To fall in love with anyone", and "Joyas Valoradas" are similar because they are both talking about love. However the way they're brought out and explained are completely different. In "To fall in love with anyone" the author wants to convey a strong message. His goal was to explain, define almost tell us things we do as humans and almost in a sense how we love. How we get to know one another so well It is targeted towards humans and the way we do things. As opposed to the article "Joyas Valoradas" where the authors main goal is to inform us with the educational sense of love. How science has a big roll on love and how it has a very big impact on our actual human life.

"To Fall in Love With Anyone" and Joyas Voladoras"

In the first reading, The New York Times, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This” the author is very different from Brian Doyle, the author of “Joyas Voladoras.” The author Mandy Len Catron, “To Fall in Love…” differs from Brian Doyle because Doyle is more serious and focused on conveying a strong message. Meanwhile, Mandy Len Catron seemed more spontaneous and upbeat in explaining his own love story. The intended audiences for both stories are different as well. In “To Fall in Love…” the audience is targeted towards people who are young adults and the generic public worldwide, while “Joyas Voladoras” intended audience is pointed towards the more scientific and educational audience. The purpose of each story is also very different. In “To Fall in Love…” the purpose was what it meant to know someone and to be known and loved. The purpose was to show that people can't choose who loves who and that biology does a lot behind closed doors. “Joyas Voladoras” purpose was to show how humans aren’t fully open with anyone because their hearts can contain so much information that not one person can completely understand or know someone because of that.

"To Fall in Love" and "Joyas Voladoras"

In both of the assigned reading the authors are speaking of “love” one from a scientific way of thinking and the other from a more abstract way of thinking. In the New York Times piece “To Fall In Love With Anyone, Do This” the author Mandy Catron discusses how she found a study that “made” two people fall in love. In her article she her target audience were both those people who thought of love in a scientific sense and those who saw love as a random thing that is unexplainable, by doing this she was trying to show both sides had a very strong argument about “love.” It is very easy to tell right off the bat that the author is very curious about the study, she wanted to try the experiment out, and she wanted to see if it actually worked. Though she does says “our experiment already fails to line up with the study” (Catron 2015), to myself this is not a big deal because later on Matron writes “the study did give us a way into a relationship” so if not for her wanting to perform the study then they would probably have never gone out at all. The Second reading “Joyas Voladoras” speaks on the topic of if it is better to keep your heart open and let it get broken or to keep it closed off in hopes of that one special someone to come around. The author Brian Doyle just from reading this thinks of love as a magical thing that has nothing to do with science, though he does include the anatomy of hearts. His main point was to ask his audicence whether or not falling in love quickly and burning out in the same amount of time is better than falling in love slowly to make a long lasting relationship, which is where he states “You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise…or you can spend them fast, like a humming bird” (Doyle 2004).

"To Fall in Love..." and "A Modest Proposal"

The first article from the The New York Times, "To Fall in Love..." is a seemingly more casual writing when compared to "A Modest Proposal". The authors had different intentions when creating their articles. Mandy Len Catron, the author of "To Fall in Love..." uses colloquial diction and by doing this is creating a casual, blog-entry type of article that is appealing to the general Internet audience. In contrast, Jonathan Swift, the author of "A Modest Proposal", is speaking on a less casual and more urgent idea. In doing so, he writes using scholarly diction and speaks in a much more scientific way, pertaining to a scholarly or exemplary audience instead of the general Internet public. In comparing these articles, you will also find that they differ in their purpose. For example, the first article in The New York Times is to inform but also entertain. Who doesn't enjoy a good love story and an interesting scientific experiment? As the second article, "A Modest Proposal" speaks about an important and much darker issue to raise awareness to it, not to entertain the audience. To speak of similarity we can address the articles in their somewhat similar purpose of informing. For example, the first article is working to inform its audience about the experiment on love, and the second is informing about a melancholy issue in Ireland.