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Francisco Campos

Professor Beadle

English 115

20 February 2019

Rhetorical Strategies Changing The Internal Space

Throughout the three essays that were read in class, all of them have to do with some of

the emotions that a person can feel. All three authors are very similar in the topic which they are

writing about, but they are also different. The authors are different from each other because of

the way that they get their message across to the audience. Each author talks about happiness in

some shape or form throughout each of their essays. The authors also provide different

experiences in which one can feel happiness or be motivated by it. All of the essays that we read

in class use at least one of the rhetorical strategies, the most common one being pathos. Each

author uses these rhetorical strategies with different purposes in mind. Some use it to hook the

reader, others use it to keep the reader engaged, they also use it so that the audience can relate to

the text that they are reading, and the authors also use it to show their credibility. David Brooks,

Graham Hill, and Sonja Lyubomirsky all focus on the internal space. They suggest transforming

this space by using the rhetorical strategies of ethos, pathos, and logos in each of their essays.

Each author has success when using the rhetorical strategies in their essays, especially when they

are suggesting how to transform one’s internal space.

In What Suffering Does by David Brooks, the one constant that is used throughout the

passage is the rhetorical strategy of pathos. He talks about suffering and what it does to the

human internally. Brooks’ use of pathos suggest changing your internal space by not always

thinking of happiness as the resolve to everything, but realizing that there are more ways of
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feeling good about yourself that don’t have to do with the feeling of pure happiness. Brooks says

that “suffering involved in their tasks becomes a fearful gift” (286), showing that most of the

people that are mentioned in his essay have found some kind of meaning or reward through the

feeling of suffering and through feeling as if they have lost everything. David Brooks also

suggested that one should not be afraid of suffering for it will make you see things in a different

perspective than you did before things went downhill. Brooks mentions that “recovering from

suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed, they come

out different” (286), and the examples that he goes on to give are ones in which people have

suffered and not only have they changed completely, but they have also done things that helps

themselves and helps the people around them. David Brooks also uses ethos in his essay so that

the reader can see that he knows what he is talking about. He mention the works of others and

brings up names of people that many of the readers will recognize such as Paul Tillich and

Theodore Roosevelt, to name a few. He also uses examples that make his argument credible,

such as the example he made about the mom losing her daughter and then going through the

suffering, but then she ends up starting a foundation that will make sure other people do not go

through the type of suffering that she has gone through with the loss of her daughter.

In Living With Less. A Lot Less by Graham Hill, Graham Hill uses the rhetorical strategies of

pathos and ethos all throughout his essay. Hill uses ethos and pathos to suggest that one change

their internal space by not making the same mistake he made, which was falling in love with

objects and demanding that he have more, when finally he had it all and wasn’t happy anymore.

He was not happy anymore because there was nothing else to own, he then learned that your

happiness shouldn’t be dependent on materialistic things. One of the ways in which Graham Hill

used ethos is the fact that he gives us a background on who he is and he uses the name of the
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company that he worked for so that the readers can see that he is serious about the topic at hand.

Another way in which ethos is used is because of the fact that this is a personal experience that

he has decided to share with the readers, making him credible because nobody can tell him

whether he is right or wrong because nobody else lived what he did or felt the way he did

throughout those moments in which he hit a high point in his life and then he hit a low point.

Pathos is used in this essay through him describing his emotions and how he felt when he first

had everything and how he felt after some time he passed and he was no longer able to acquire

anything that had much significance to him. Graham Hill said “My success and the things I

bought changed from novel to norm” (309), demonstrating that he had lost feelings when he

could no longer buy anything new. He makes sure to let people know that they should stop

caring about materials by ending his essay by saying “my space is small. My life is big” ( Hill

312).

In How Happy Are You and Why? by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Lyubomirsky talks about the

feeling of happiness and the reason as to why certain people feel happy and why other people do

not feel happy at all. In order to get her message across she uses all three rhetorical strategies, all

three being ethos, pathos, and logos. Sonja Lyubomirsky uses both ethos and logos by showing

readers data in her essay, not only making her credible, but easy to agree with. Her numbers

provide evidence so that the reader can be well informed about all the studies that have been

conducted on her topic. She uses a graph to show the readers the happiness score of different

generations and she uses a pie chart to demonstrate what affects happiness and how much it

affects it. She also mentions three of the myths that there are about the reasons why a person can

be happy. Sonja Lyubomirsky also uses pathos when she mentions all the stories of the people

she has interviewed. This draws emotion because in some of the stories, some people went
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through some harsh things as they were growing up and as a child they were not happy, but now

as adults they have found happiness. In other stories the people had a very good upbringing, did

not go through much that made them suffer, but now as adults they don’t find much happiness in

doing things. The use of this gives the readers the ability to relate to one or more of the stories

that are mentioned in the essay. The use of all these rhetorical devices present a suggestion to

transforming internal space by making one look within themselves and find why they are happy

or why they aren’t happy and change it.

Overall, the three authors, David Brooks, Graham Hill, and Sonja Lyubomirsky found ways

to implement some, of not all, of the rhetorical devices into their articles and they made it in a

way in which it could make one change their internal space. The stories all had the same topic,

but it was presented in different ways, that topic being happiness. Some of the essays presented

stories from other people that allowed the reader to relate to some of them, whereas one of the

essays did not have a story straight from another person's mouth, instead it was just an example

of a mother losing her child, which not many can relate to. Most of the stories involved some

kind of data or study that was conducted on the topic at hand, which made the authors seem more

credible because they were giving the readers evidence that supported their arguments. All of

these strategies used by each author, David Brooks, Graham Hill, and Sonja Lyubomirsky, were

successful in their own right because they were all convincing due to the fact that they had most

of the rhetorical strategies implemented within their essays, making the reader take a minute and

think about what is being discussed and look within themselves to see if they need a change of

internal space.