Analysis Of Mike Rose's Essay: Blue Collar Brilliance

In “Blue Collar Brilliance” Mike Rose starts of by telling us two stories, one about his mother and the other about his uncle Joe. They worked what people would call blue collar jobs; everybody usually perceives blue collar jobs as grunt work which doesn’t take much intelligence to work. However Rose disagrees with that notion; Rose describes to us in detail how his moms’ intellect in the restaurant work field kept the place calm, efficient and balanced. He also told us a story of how his uncle Joe worked up the ranks of the auto industry after dropping out of school in the ninth grade. One of Rose’s main points in “Blue Collar Brilliance” is that intelligence isn’t always measured with grades and tests and, that blue collar jobs take just

In the U.S society, there is a distinguishment between the different classification of employment. Those categories of employment are either classified as “blue-collar” or “white-collar”. Blue-collar jobs are referred to the line of employment that require manual labor such as factory workers and truck drivers, as for the white-collar jobs require high skills and higher education such as doctors and lawyers (Chambliss and Eglitis 159). Although, the professions are labeled as blue or white collar through its needs, the different labels indicates one’s position in the ranks. Each rank is often associated with characteristic that either make them upper class or lower class. Furthermore, “people’s life experience and opportunities are powerfully influenced by how their social category is ranked”(Chambliss and Eglitis 159). Therefore, one’s lifestyle depends on which category they fall into within the rank. That being the case, journalist Alfred Lubrano wrote the book, Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, which describes the cultural conflict experienced by white-collar professionals that grew up in blue-collar homes. It tells readers how the white-collar professionals found it difficult to apply to their blue-collar families, due to the fact, that they often held values and engaged in behaviors that apply to the upper-class. As in order to fit in within the groups, they would have to adapt to the upper class life. So the transition from a blue-collar life to a

If anyone knew Paul Harvey, you could tell by his voice that he was a down to earth kind of man. He always spoke softly and with great eloquence. It was just a part of his personality. When delivering this speech, Paul was no different. He connected with the audience members and enhanced his appeals to ethos and pathos just through his language choices and tone. The speech contains anecdote after anecdote, which strengthens the rhetorical devices that make the speech’s message effective. Paul uses ethos to build up the character of the farmer and pathos to emotionally relate the farmer to each member of the audience. These tactics greatly impact Harvey’s speech.

Blue Collar workers as the fundamental that makes up America. One such man, author Mike Rose a professor at UCLA, who wrote "Blue-Collar Brilliance," published in a reputable magazine in 2009 in the American Scholar, what Rose argues, is that blue-collar workers often overlooked. In effect, that the establishment of where you work acts as an institution of learning and those without a formal education have valuable types of "brilliance." Rose argues his claim by using pathos, logos through personal stories, credentials, and comprehensive counterarguments.

Joey Franklin makes masterful use of rhetoric in his essay “Working at Wendy’s” to construct an entertaining and compelling argument in favor of recognizing that the workers of the service industry are not just undistinguished drones, but rather complicated people, each with their own desires and stories. To this end, the author utilizes the effective rhetorical device of pathos, logos, and ethos. Franklin demonstrates an excellent use of imagery that serves as a conduit for empathy, which is vital for the use of pathos, the emotional appeal. In reference to logos, the appeal to logic, he paints the picture of a hard-working father that needs to provide for his family. This is a clear representation of common logic and ties into ethos, which is the rhetorical appeal to authority and ethics, in the sense that many people can relate to caring about and working to support family. For ethos, he establishes himself as your everyday working man — part of the working class. This shows that he’s clearly apt for speaking of the position he’s in, and allows the audience to relate to him through pathos.

In any successful work of non-fiction, authors employ the use of rhetorical analysis to articulate their main points and ideas. Mike Rose’s essay, “Blue Collar Brilliance,” focuses on the fact that looking down on blue-collar workers is a common occurrence in America and people fail to understand how a person can be intelligent if they had dropped out of school. Throughout the essay, he refutes this notion and explains why blue-collar intelligence may be different from the intelligence gained by years of schooling but it is of the equal stature, since it helps them in their occupation. Rose uses pathos and other rhetorical devices to inform the audience of his belief: blue-collar workers are under appreciated and overlooked as many people fail to see the difficulties and cognitive demands involved in their daily routines at work.

In the article, Rose use many emotional personal examples to help the reader understand the amount of hard work and intelligence a blue collar job requires. Rose creates a personal connection with the reader by describing his first-hand experience of growing up watching his mother put her heart and soul into being a waitress in a restaurant. Rose says, “She described the way she memorized who ordered what, how long each dish is supposed to take to prepare, and how she became a pro at meeting the emotional needs of her customers and colleagues alike.” From the quote in the article the reader understand that Roses mother was required to have a high level of intelligence in order to meet the needs of her customers and colleagues alike in order to do her job proficiently. Rose uses emotion in this quote to make the reader relate to his mother and understand that she was a hard worker and did everything in her power to do whatever it took in order to hopefully receive a tip that would be used to support her family. Rose also says, “I couldn’t have put it in words when I was growing up, but what I observed in my mother’s restaurant defined the world of adults, a place where competence was synonymous with physical work”. Rose uses in this quote to relate that his mother’s job

Throughout his editorial, Brooks applies his common sense and general observations to support his argument. The first line that Brooks uses as an attention-grabber is, “Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making

Charles Murray is writing to The Wall Street Journal, which is a huge and very diverse audience to whom to present such a controversial argument. The point Murray is trying to make is that vocational schools are more effective and logical courses of action for young people entering the job market than is the conventional 4-year-university track. In championing the cause of vocational schools over college, Murray uses logos, appeals to authority, though his tone makes him come across as a little condescending. This may almost damage his argument overall. Murray’s argument is persuasive through his use of

Mike Rose has spent most of his life watching those defined as “blue-collar” workers with much appreciation. He would watch his mother, Rosie, and his uncle, Joe, work to their fullest potential with skills he had never really seen anywhere else except in their “blue-collar” world. Mike believes that the way his family worked, as well as others considered “blue-collar”, are intelligent in their own ways and are underappreciated compared to the way he sees them.

There is a Chinese proverb that says, “ Those who say it cannot be done, should not interrupt those doing it.” Steve Olson wrote an essay that talks about that very principle. He titled his essay “Year of the Blue-Collar Guys”. It is about the hard working blue collar guys (BCGs) living in America, but what was his purpose in writing about BCGs? What kind of modes of persuasion does he use to persuade his audience to his way of thinking? How does he respond to the opposing side of his argument, and what kind of logical fallacies does he use?

In my observation mentally with Mr. Roses essay on blue collar brilliance, Mr Rose tries to tell the reader on the different levelsof work there is for high educated people opposed to the non educated. Furthermore he tries express through his family experiences in the work environment how a person with a manual labor is not so different than a person with a high level of education, they are equal in job to job views but not in society.

In the article “Blue-Collar Brilliance”, Mike Rose’s main focus was to convey that there are forms of intelligence than just being intellectual. Rose, suggest that a broader perspective of education allow us to expand our understanding of what intelligence is. Rose explains what our culture views as intelligence: “Our cultural iconography promotes the muscled arm; sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no brightness behind the eye, no image that links hand and brain” (Rose). In making this comment, Rose urges us to take a step back and to look society’s perception of blue-collar work as not as demanding or requiring as much brain powering as white-collar work. Often people do not realize that a person who has a blue-collar job is just as

First, being employed in the blue-collar industry a person must show intuition. Rose studied the habits of the blue-collar workplace, and based on his observations came to better understand how the job requires both physical and mental capabilities of an individual. The author Mike Rose, grew up in the 1940’s, this is an example of ethos in the story. Rose observed his mother, Rosie Rose work in a local restaurant as a waitress. Rose observed his mother’s impressive ability to retain food orders while keeping track of her list of side work was a skill demonstrating her intuitive capabilities that were learned out her

Over many centuries, society tends to frame the obscene differences to antagonize and alienate each other whether it's about a political or religious view, social reasons, or financial situations. In “Blue Collar Brilliance”, Mike Rose provides an invigorating story to persuade his audience to understand that having a blue collar job compared to a white-collar job does not determine how smart someone is. Rose uses anecdotes, rhetorical question, and logos to show that blue-collar workers learn just as much without a formal education.