"Road Warrior"

“Road Warrior” Dave Berry

                The audience is the American people, pretty much everyone who drives, shops, businesses, and maybe especially the “Mister News Media Opinion-maker.”

                Berry uses was initially seems logos appeal, but it is only logical to us because he describes the same thing most of us feel whenever we are on the road, which is more pathos. He is eliciting an emotional response from us because we all know those left lane hogs and those cart blockers and those wait for an hour after you get in your car kind of people. Of course not personally or else we would probably hurt them. . . . badly. But he also extracts a humor out of the situation by hyperbolizing the situation into a proportion we normally do when in that circumstance. This makes you want to read and share the piece and you completely agree with him on the fact that we only have road rage because of other annoying people and their bad habits. Through this ethos and hyperbolized logos, we come to really like and trust Berry’s opinion thus creating the ethos appeal. We trust him because he is one of us stuck in the slowest lane of traffic, circling around the parking lot and just trying to get one thing in the grocery store that just seems to take forever. The reader, or at least I, got so caught up in his essay that I kind of forgot what he was arguing in the first place but he had me agreeing with him on everything he said. Which is what I believe rhetoric is for. Plus if you are one of those people he was talking about, you are not aware of it and should improve your behavior.