Illiteracy is Sabotage: A Rhetorical Critique of Sherman Alexie’s
The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me
Expectations can alter a person’s ability to establish an outcome of choice. Society determines the role that every individual must adapt to in accordance to age, gender, sexual preference, race, ethnicity, and/or class. The struggle to define a unique entity can be overshadowed by the constant pressure to conform to the prototypical stereotype of human classification. A common example to this implementation is that Hispanics are lazy. A simple phrase like such can make the difference between surpassing the judgments and merely adjusting to life as a sluggish creature. In Sherman Alexie’s piece, The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me, he excels the anticipated part portrayed by life’s discriminative system through the passion of obtaining knowledge from books.
The passage was published in the Los Angeles Times on April 19, 1998. My first assumptions of the reader’s interests are to be amused, up to date, or challenged by acquiring new information in a daily bases. The particular newspaper and the simplicity of the language used throughout the piece implies that the target audience is broad rather than an exclusive group because California is a state embodied by many ethnicities and races. The author wanted the audience to be able to understand his view of equality by sharing his life story. He’s a Spokane Indian who grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington State to a low/middle-class family that consisted of a mother, father, older brother and three sisters (Alexie 126). The intention of emplacing the information in his introducing paragraph is for the audience to appeal to ethos; it establishes the background and the reliability of the author to connect with the reader. He organizes his piece in a chronological structure. The beginning sentences foreshadow an event of his life and it opens a sequential form of...