Advocacy Paper
I took the most pleasure in writing my advocacy paper out of all the projects we did this year by far. This is definitely because I feel a pretty strong passion for the subject, and feel the way things are right now is unjust. As I further analyzed the situation and broke my paper down into main points, I became more and more engaged in the paper. I found this one of the most challenging papers due to the nature of my audience, but I also found this obstacle very stimulating and think it improved my overall advocacy style writing greatly.
Other than technical and mechanical mistakes, the two main areas that were suggested for change in my paper were regarding the placement and elaboration of possibly my best argument and the use of my emotion appeal, intersecting ethos and pathos. Looking back on my paper, I realized that the fact that the players are legal adults was really my strongest argument. I then thought it was ludicrous to leave it as was, a little throw in at the end of the paragraph. Instead, I re-worked my paper and dedicated the majority of my second paragraph to that idea. On the other hand, I didn’t agree as much with the idea of possibly focusing only on the ethos part of my paper and removing the parts of my paper that tug at the readers heart strings. I feel that one of the biggest reasons highschool players skip to the NBA is out of financial need, and that invokes a feeling of empathy out of a lot of readers, making my argument that much better.
