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Anti-Intellectualism : Why We Hate The Smart Kids By Grant Penrod Summary

Decent Essays

In his article, Penrod first starts out talking about how a football team won an Arizona state championship the previous year. Penrod then goes on to talk about how no one paid any attention to the Science bowl team since everyone was focused on the athletes. Furthermore, Penrod points out how there is “disdain for the educated harbored in much of society,” and also speaks about stereotypes associated with intelligent kids and how uneducated celebrities are not setting a good example for future kids to get an education. Many intelligent kids are being overlooked because of the stigma of being a “nerd,” as well as the fact that anti-intellectualism is becoming more popular. A man, author Grant Penrod, wrote “Anti-Intellectualism: Why We …show more content…

Even though Penrod uses very good examples that pertain to pathos, he is lacking the use of ethos in his paper. Penrod does not truly exercise the use of ethos, counterarguments, consideration of other positions, and convincing reasons or evidence in his paper. Throughout the essay, Penrod practically uses hasty generalizations. The reason I say this is due to the fact that he utilizes information and comments from online boards. Yes, the comments on these boards do in fact appeal to pathos, however, they are not very applicable to the appeal of ethos. Penrod does not use very credible websites when looking up his information and adding it to his paper. For example, he uses a website called “talkingcock.com.” This website is not very credible and consists of an online discussion board. Furthermore, Penrod uses information from a website called, “Angelfire.com” to talk about famous high school dropouts. Although this information may be valid, it does not mean that absolutely every single high school dropout is going to be successful. Penrod focuses solely on the famous high school dropouts without acknowledging that there are in fact high school dropouts that are not successful and rich like the celebrities he has brought up. Therefore, Penrod fails to acknowledge a counterargument at this time, as well as being logical. Also, tying into the fact

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