“Waking up” by Anya Kamenetz, is an article written about college debt and ways to help avoid getting into debt in general. She starts it off by starting with politics in the first few opening paragraphs basically talking about how the older people of Congress are ruling the world and how that’s “the only way”. She then goes on to talk about the sit in at Yale and includes how it was a group of students who needed to be removed by police from the financial aid office. Then she tells us what exactly it accomplished. 2 weeks after Yale passed a rule where your family has to make at least $50k a year to go there thus limiting the number of people that can actually go there. After this she goes on to talk about many different other schools and how their prices work this then leads us into her main claim of the article, in order to counter college debt, you simply join a PAC. Your voice as an individual can’t be heard but as a pack, your voice will be heard.
This statement is shown very well after she describes the sit in at Yale. She will go on to talk about other schools in different countries and talk about what they did in order to change up thing with college debt. This was very good to include in her article because the fact that it puts pressure on the US colleges. If this one school in a different country is doing this one thing that benefits the students, why can’t we? In the article she goes on to talk about PACs and how if you want your voice to be heard that’s the way to do it.
The types of rhetorical appeals she tries to get off is definitely persuasion. The entire time she’s writing the article she’s trying to persuade you to go out and make something change. Her main way of trying to get this off is by convincing people to join a PAC. But before she does this, in the beginning she was talking about the Yale sit in and had to include that they were removed from police. I think this is her way of getting the reader attached by hitting their emotions. When you read about a peaceful protest that police get called in on doesn’t that just make you angry? Doesn’t that make you want to go out and change something?
To conclude, Kamenetzs article is all about pushing toward a big change. Your voice as an individual may not be heard but if you get together with people your voice will be heard.
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