In “Introduction: Getting Ready” from Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, she describes the experiment she performed in order to expose the conditions of living on minimum wage as well as accredit herself with the prerequisites for reporting on the subject.

The introduction of Ehrenreich’s novel, Nickel and Dimed, was written with the intent to inform the audience of some background information that supports the rest of the book. One of the important ways she does this is by providing statistics and facts about the lives of those living on minimum wage. She does this mostly in the beginning of the intro: “were the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?”(1). In this sentence not only does she mention the sheer amount of people who are forced to live on minimum wage, but she also states the low amount that these women are being paid. By telling the audience this information she can convince the reader that the low class workers of America are not being paid enough. By using data to argue this point she is using the rhetorical device logos in her introduction. …show more content…
She uses the emotions of the reader to sway their opinion to her side of the argument. When talking about poverty and difficult lives it is easy for her to play onto the feelings of the readers. When she states “ [poverty is] not a place you would want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear”(6), it makes the reader feel nervous not only for Ehrenreich being in that situation, but also for the worry of possibly being in a situation at which they are living in poverty. By evoking this response in the audience she can create empathy for those in the lower working class and further the belief that living conditions supported by minimum wage are