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Persuasive Articles About Gun Control Essay

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Persuasive articles about Gun Control

Persuading an audience can be done in several different fashions, one of which is Hugh Rank's Model of Persuasion. Rank's model states that two major strategies are used to achieve the particular goal of persuasion. These strategies are nicely set into two main schemas; the first method is to exaggerate an aspect of something, known as "intensify." While the second is to discredit it, which is referred to as "downplay." Al Franken, Jeffrey Snyder, Harlan Ellison, and George Will, have all written persuasive articles about gun control. In reading all of the various articles on gun control by authors, I found George F. Will's The Last Word to be the most persuasive. Will wrote his piece about …show more content…

The least persuasive essay out of the four was Harlan Ellison's An Edge in My Voice. Ellison presents his argument in a style that seems to me is more of a disgruntled rambling about both famous and infamous people that die from gun shot, than an article about gun control. Ellison spends the first few pages asking the reader if they cried when a certain person died; he begins with famous people such as Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and John Lennon, and then moves on to more obscure examples. Instead of trying to build an argument, Ellison seemed to be more caught up with anger and the notion of conspiracies. He does however try to use the "intensify" technique of Rank's model, to persuade the reader of the horror of deaths caused by guns and their importance. Although Ellison did try to persuade his audience in a different manor, I felt it was ineffective at best, due to his repetition and exaggeration.
From these four articles written by Franken, Snyder, Ellison, and Will I personally found Will's piece to be the most persuasive with Franken's not far behind. Will's approach was more formal while Franken's style was more satirical, but I felt both authors were able to incorporate Rank's model and persuade the reader more subtlety than the other authors
Sources

1. Al Franken, Phil Gramm, Gun Lover
2. Jeffery R. Snyder, A Nation of Cowards

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