Two Sides

If someone wants to get a point across to a wide audience they must appeal to people’s emotions, logic, or show them that they are credible. In the book The Other Wes Moore the author tries to show his readers that any decision made could change a life in a positive or negative way. Throughout his book, Wes Moore compares the lives of two boys with the same name, growing up at the same time, both in bad neighborhoods. He examines these young men and tries to show when and why their lives changed for better and worse. People cannot choose their living conditions or who their parents are, but Wes Moore shows how the decisions made today can change a person’s future for better or worse. For his audience, use of pathos is the best way for the author Wes Moore to inspire his readers to listen to his purpose of this story and make a change in their lives. To further support his book the author appeals to the audience’s ethos and logos but they are minor in comparison to his appeal to pathos. The free Wes Moore made a very powerful impression on his readers by appealing to his audience’s pathos. Pathos is the rhetorical appeal to the audience’s different emotions. Throughout the book, he ties people closer to the main characters by referencing their tragic childhoods and explaining how rough the neighborhoods were that they lived in. Moore says, “These were people so deranged by frustration that they were burning down their own neighborhood,” (19) is one example that depicts how bad their neighborhoods were. When the author compares and contrasts the Wes’ he always keeps the comparison that both were in the living conditions they were in because they were in some way victims of their government and the world around them. His connections through his emotions come together through the credibility that he portrays through the rhetorical technique of ethos. Ethos is the rhetorical appeal to someone’s credibility which is important in this book because its purpose is to