Molly Gaglione
UCWR 110 - 012
Professor Jaffe
4 October 2017
The Use of Rhetoric as a Persuasive Device in “The Ways We Lie”
In the world today, lying is something that is seemingly unavoidable. Religious leaders lie to hide illegal crimes committed within the church; athletes lie about use of performance enhancing drugs; news stations lie about the credibility of their reports; the President of the United States even lies about the number of people who attended his inauguration; more commonly, however, an average person will commit an untruth over the course of their daily lives, whether it be necessarily known to them or not. These are the kinds of lies that are explored in Stephanie Ericsson’s “The Ways We Lie.” This article dives into …show more content…
Through her own personal anecdotes, Ericsson prompts her readers to identify and empathize with the situations she accounts for in which she found lies to be a necessity, via pathos. The reader first encounters Ericsson’s use of pathos in the very opening lines of the essay, describing a typical day in her life: “The bank called today and I told them the deposit was in the mail, even though I hadn’t written a check yet. It’d been a rough day.” … “When my partner came home, his haggard face told me his day hadn’t gone any better than mine, so when he asked, ‘How was your day?’ I said, ‘Oh, fine,’ knowing that one more straw may break his back” (159). In this excerpt, Ericsson reveals two of the ways she commonly lies and presents them in a way that are easy to identify with. Her first lie to the bank. This lie is intended to spare both herself and the bank correspondent the explanation of why she has yet to put her deposit in the bank as well as spare herself a potential scolding from the bank employee. The second lie she tells is to her partner. By telling her partner that her day was “fine” rather than telling him how horrible it had really been, Ericsson likely prevented a “whose day was worse” argument or simply assured her partner that she was not also in a bad mood to add on to his own. Along with these lies, the author also implies that there were no repercussions to her untruths, and that
UCWR 110 - 012
Professor Jaffe
4 October 2017
The Use of Rhetoric as a Persuasive Device in “The Ways We Lie”
In the world today, lying is something that is seemingly unavoidable. Religious leaders lie to hide illegal crimes committed within the church; athletes lie about use of performance enhancing drugs; news stations lie about the credibility of their reports; the President of the United States even lies about the number of people who attended his inauguration; more commonly, however, an average person will commit an untruth over the course of their daily lives, whether it be necessarily known to them or not. These are the kinds of lies that are explored in Stephanie Ericsson’s “The Ways We Lie.” This article dives into …show more content…
Through her own personal anecdotes, Ericsson prompts her readers to identify and empathize with the situations she accounts for in which she found lies to be a necessity, via pathos. The reader first encounters Ericsson’s use of pathos in the very opening lines of the essay, describing a typical day in her life: “The bank called today and I told them the deposit was in the mail, even though I hadn’t written a check yet. It’d been a rough day.” … “When my partner came home, his haggard face told me his day hadn’t gone any better than mine, so when he asked, ‘How was your day?’ I said, ‘Oh, fine,’ knowing that one more straw may break his back” (159). In this excerpt, Ericsson reveals two of the ways she commonly lies and presents them in a way that are easy to identify with. Her first lie to the bank. This lie is intended to spare both herself and the bank correspondent the explanation of why she has yet to put her deposit in the bank as well as spare herself a potential scolding from the bank employee. The second lie she tells is to her partner. By telling her partner that her day was “fine” rather than telling him how horrible it had really been, Ericsson likely prevented a “whose day was worse” argument or simply assured her partner that she was not also in a bad mood to add on to his own. Along with these lies, the author also implies that there were no repercussions to her untruths, and that