1 Francis James Francis Williams RWS 200 Jan. 25, 2010 A Military Wives Tale "Fort Drum- The Army and the soldiers first choice." This is the motto of Fort Drum army base in New York. Why is this important? This is where Laura Dempsey lives with her military officer husband, and where she was when she wrote her latest article. Laura Dempsey's latest article entitled "The Military vs. Wives" was published in the Washington Post February 19, 2008. It is an article that attempts to bring to light the struggles of modern military wives, including the added financial and career stress that is not prevalent in the lives of most civilian wives. To elaborate, she believes that, for one, military wives have to jump more hurdles in order to maintain their professional lives, for example being a teacher or lawyer, then civilian wives do. In this essay I will look at two rhetorical strategies employed by Laura Dempsey, logos appeal and compare/contrast in the article as well as the overall structure of the article itself. In this article, Laura Dempsey uses rhetorical strategies in order to give legitimacy to her article. For instance one of the biggest rhetorical strategies that she uses is the Logos appeal. She is constantly giving statistics and facts to back up her argument for instance, she states "Unemployment among military wives is four times the national average." (Paragraph 6). This appeal to logos is necessary to show her audience that she has done research and that the article is not solely made up of opinions or unfounded bias. Logos is an incredibly important appeal. Throughout an article or essay, and author needs to build his credibility and the best way of doing this is to make a strong argument based on logos. After all, when the audience begins to
Francis 2 read the article they do not know anything about the author or his credibility. Laura Dempsey made a sound judgment call when she decided to use stats and numbers in a logos appeal. Most of her audience does not know who she is, but in order to persuade them to see her point of view she used an overall logos appeal to prove her arguments but also to boost her credibility. When writing a persuasive essay however, logos and credibility are not the only things the author should worry about. A second, but no less important rhetorical strategy that authors possess in their arsenal is the compare and contrast strategy. To compare and contrast is simply to compare one fact or idea against another and note their similarities and differences. Laura Dempsey uses this strategy in her article when she compares the lives of military wives to the live of ordinary civilians. One example of this strategy is Laura from Dempsey's seventh paragraph when she states that "There is a $12,000 wage gap between college educated civilian and military wives." (Paragraph 7). What Laura Dempsey has done here is taken two different groups of people, civilian wives and military wives, found something in common between them, college education, and then pointed out the differences. This rhetorical strategy is extremely important when you're trying to show the differences or similarities between two separate groups. However, without proper organization the aforementioned rhetorical strategies would not fare too well. One of the most important aspects of writing an article or an essay is making sure that it is organized properly. Laura Dempsey attempted to make her article easy to read by doing a number of things. First of all, the longest paragraph in the entire article is seven sentences. This means, that she is moving through her arguments and points relatively fast which, if you're trying to hold an audience, is a good thing. When you make the paragraphs smaller and you transition from point to point in good time it helps the author hold the attention of more readers.
Francis 3 Holding more readers for a longer period of time, means you can potentially persuade more people to agree with you. Another thing that Laura Dempsey does in this article is the proper use of facts and quotes. When you're writing a paper you do not want facts and figures to be left alone, you want them explained, preferably in detail. Laura Dempsey does this in her article with all of her facts. Every fact in her paper is introduced, providing context to the reader, and then is briefly explained so as to provide relevancy to her arguments. These methods of organizing a paper are highly important when it comes to persuasive writing. By organizing her paper well Laura Dempsey most likely reached more readers and got them to believe in her arguments. Overall, I believe that Laura Dempsey wrote a completely adequate article about the hardships of military life, it was organized well and it possessed good usage of rhetorical strategies and appeals. She used logos to appeal to our logic and reason as well as boost her credibility, she used compare and contrast to point out differences in civilian and military wives, and finally she used good organization to get her main arguments across. This article was extremely well written, she used plenty of examples but that was about it. Her article did not possess much personality and I did not get any sense of her writing style. Plain and simply this article made the core arguments that Laura Dempsey wanted, but outside of that, this article could have been written by anyone.