Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Tow #3

Everyone Loves a Loser, by Liza Mundy is an article about how America loves to embrace failure. In America, failure is not something to be ashamed of, but rather it should be embraced. They ultimate key to success is to fail and learn from your mistakes. "The failure fetish," as Liza calls it, is evident in almost everything-even parenting. Children are encouraged to fail and learn from their mistakes in order to succeed. Even politicians come to embrace "pro-failure."

The context of this text is how failure has become so impactful in order to reach success. The purpose of this article is to explain how failure came from being hated to being the most accepted because if you fail, that means that you have learned a lesson and grew from it. This text was written for people who feel like they fail at everything all the time because it encourages them to embrace their failure and learn something from it in order to succeed the next time.

"As the historian Robert Dallek pointed out to me, overcoming failure-bankruptcy, addiction, dissolution, defeat-is part of the quintessential American success story" (The Atlantic 14). This quote really appeals to logos because all of these things happened in America and we have been overcoming them and overall our country is successful despite having many problems. However, this statement can also be highly controversial because some people may feel as though we have had only minor success/ This statement also appeals to ethos because a Historian is saying this and it proves his credibility because these are all things that have occurred in our country. This also appeals to pathos because our country has come a long way and failed many times in order to succeed.

This article uses many rhetorics. A big one would be irony. This whole article seems so ironic because failure is not supposed to be a good thing. After all, it is called failure. However, ironically, you need to fail in order to succeed. An epiphany is used in this article because it suddenly makes sense that so many of the people that have failed but learned from it, have then succeeded. Juxtaposition is evident in this article because it brings up examples of people who failure before success and people who fail after success. The author does a good job giving examples and explaining why you need to fail before you succeed, not after.

Liza Mundy is credible because she has written for many publications including The Guardian, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post, etc. In my opinion, she really accomplished her purpose in expressing America's "fetish" for failure. She really showed what failure does and that people embrace it in order to learn and grow wiser.

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