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Frederick Douglass Learning To Read Rhetorical Analysis

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The excerpt, “Learning to Read” from Fredrick Douglass’ autobiography portrays the struggle and hardship a slave has to go through at the time. Douglass writes about himself as a slave when he was younger and trying to be educated like the white children. He proposes his main goal of slavery to be abolished by using various writing techniques. Douglass uses the rhetorical triangle in order to strengthen his argument that slavery is wrong. By using an ethical approach, logical appeal and emotional appeal, Douglass effectively uses the rhetorical tactics to demonstrate how life can be as a slave and to convince that slavery should be removed.
Throughout the excerpt, Douglass is personal background to show his credibility as an author. He demonstrate how life was for himself as a slave and how he couldn’t do as …show more content…
The author uses his own emotions to depict an image of how helpless and not important he felt after learning how to read. Douglass states “[t]he more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers” (406). Despite learning to read, he still wasn’t happy with his life as a slave. The author uses his feelings to prove how slavery is affecting his life in a negative way. Then Douglass extends to express his affections by stating “[i] often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I should have killed myself, or done something for which I should have been killed” (406). This quote is significant because it reveals his true feelings about not wanting to live. Freedom for slaves is his true intention in this whole excerpt. Douglass intends to use emotions in order to catch the audience’s attention towards the true objective of abolishing slavery. In doing so, the feeling of wanting to die is effective because it may be something that humans can indirectly relate

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