Working in manual labor for many years takes a physical toll on the body, making it unlikely to work with these types of jobs for very long. Author Libby Sander, wrote “Blue-Collar: Boomers Take Work Ethic to College” published in 2008 in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and she argues that due to the increase in unemployment older Americans are having a harder time finding a job because most never went to college. Through the use of emotional appeals from the personal experiences of older Americans and usage of statistics and recent survey, Libby creates a strong argument that successfully appeals her target group.
In her article, Libby sets the stage by describing a typical day of an old American doing the same agonizing routine that the…show more content… The middle of her article is full of emotional images that convey sympathy; Libby showed the life of an electrician that “spent years crawling on his stomach to run wires through confined spaces” until he couldn’t handle it no more and “preferred the idea of young electricians doing the crawling while he ran the business.” The visual that Libby evokes is the struggles that old American and how they can’t handle or just not wanting to do the heavy lifting and by going to college they can make others do the work for them that can and willing to do the heavy lifting for them. Libby’s goal is to make the reader feel like the people in the article and be encouraged to go to community college. In other to motivate the reader she uses words like “finish,” “reaching,” “determined,” “change,” “pursue,” “fulfill,” “adapt,” rewarding,” All of these words evoke positive emotions about making a better life for the older Americans, which makes the reader feel excited to go and do it. Another feeling Libby reinforces with the choice of her words is sadness and pain: “ruptured,” “couldn’t,” “unexpected,” “old,” “outdated,” These choice of words help describe the situations of the old Americans that aren’t going to