Arvanitas 1 Israel Arvanitas Marlena Stanford English 1010 27 July 2017 Rhetorical Comparative Analysis When analyzing the article written by Mike Rose, “Blue-Collar Brilliance”, and the article written by Matthew B. Crawford, “Shop Class as Soulcraft”, we can see several differences in the strategies they use. Rose’s text was an educational article about the intelligence gained through manual labor fields. His purpose in doing so was to reduce the cultural divide between the white and blue collar work forces and to suppress a common belief that blue collar workers were illiterate or possessed less intelligence that those who pursued a higher education through academics. Crawford had also written his article based around the blue collar work force, but focused his attention on the values the craftsman possessed and the importance such values would hold in our children. Mike Rose, and Matthew B. Crawford, both have published well-known articles in the academic community. Rose makes use of storytelling and description to develop emotion and understanding, as well as his educational background to show his credibility with the audience. Crawford takes a different approach by using style and tone to demonstrate the importance of his argument, as well as empirical evidence in the form of citing other authors to provide him credibility with his audience. The authors use similar guidelines to show evidence in their articles, which is the intelligence gained through manual labor trades, although both texts are meant to serve different purposes.
Arvanitas 2 Mike Rose’s article, “Blue-Collar Brilliance” was published in the magazine, “The American Scholar” June 1st of 2009 and intended to appeal to an audience of higher intelligence, such as the white collar work force. Rose begins his article by using the rhetorical strategies of storytelling and description to paint a picture of his mother and uncle’s work environments. Such as a reflection he had of his mother, “Rosie took customers’ orders, pencil poised over pad, while fielding the questions about the food. She walked full tilt through the room with plates stretching up her left arm and two cups of coffee somehow cradled in her right hand” (Rose 1-3). Another example we can see of Rose’s use of description involves the strenuous environment his uncle worked in at the General Motors factory within these sentences, “When I was a young man, Joe took me on a tour of the factory. The floor was loud – in some places deafening – and when I turned the corner or opened a door, the smell of chemicals knocked my head back. The work was repetitive and taxing, and the pace was inhumane” (Rose 3-3). The use of these strategies builds an emotional bond with the audience as they see how his relatives battled with the duties in their workplace. The bond will coerce his audience to feel a sort of empathy about the physical and mental stresses his family members endured. Then from empathy spawns sympathy, which by one definition is to agree or approve of an opinion, we can then see how this will assist his purpose in the text. Furthermore these descriptions serve the purpose of developing a basic understanding of the critical and cognitive thinking his family used to navigate through their daily tasks. He uses statements like, “work smart” and, “make every move count” to be further evidence in supporting this notion (Rose 2-2). By such descriptions the audience would be forced to see some sort of strategic method to even the simplest of actions, even just walking around in the workplace can take cognitive thinking.
Arvanitas 3 The author Mike Rose then uses the strategy of invoking authority by giving a detailed explanation of his education and study in social services, in which he shows the audience he has had years of schooling and spent years of study to develop what he calls, “cognitive biographies” (Rose). This will play two roles when speaking to the audience, first being that he has spent time towards a higher education through academics, and second, he stands in the defense of the otherwise thought to be unintelligent manual laborer. The first role portrays Rose to the audience as a peer, or a follow scholar. The second portrays Rose as non-bias as he is a scholar and defending the intelligence of those who are not. This has the potential to go two ways, either seen as a peer and be able to see the argument like-minded, or the audience will see the dedication he has put into such research. Either way making him a credible source for the information provided on the matter. Matthew B. Crawford takes a different approach in his text. Rather than using an abundance of storytelling and description, he uses the style and tone of the text to build emotion and understanding. And instead of using the invoking authority strategy, he uses empirical evidence to build credibility for his argument. Crawford had written an essay that was published in a journal, “The New Atlantis - A Journal of Technology & Society” in the summer of 2006, which then he expanded into a bestselling book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work” published in 2009 by Penguin Press. He had written this essay in an attempt to show the values one learns with the devotion and technique of creating or fixing something. His intended audience would have been individuals who believed trade work is a lesson of the past; and the belief that students needed to be trained as, “knowledge workers”, for preparation of their roles in the future (Crawford). This in turn got his essay a lot of recognition, which then gave him the idea of expanding upon it to develop the book. Crawford uses the strategy of style
Arvanitas 4 and tone to shape his argument in the importance of shop class, as well as empirical evidence to provide him credibility with the audience. The use of style throughout the essay is shown through the wording. The use of well used articulated text and his use of a wide vocabulary portray him to the audience as an educated individual who is passionate about this particular situation. We can see examples of this as early in his text as the introduction here, “Essentially, there is another hood under the hood. This creeping concealedness takes various forms. The fasteners holding small appliances together now often require esoteric screwdrivers not commonly available, apparently to prevent the curious or the angry form interrogating the innards” (Crawford 1-1). By reading this phrase the audience will gather he is educated in various forms of mechanical repairs as he brushes past examples of cars and appliances, and the specifics of tools now required to work with them. His use of exotic words like esoteric and innards portray him as a literate individual. His play on the words shows his text to be well thought out, for example, ”there is another hood under the hood”, essentially just describing the layers one goes through to get to the guts of a machine. His use of tone in the essay depicts it as an urgent or important matter. He uses this strategy all throughout his essay, one such statement that stands out to me is, “Scientific managers, themselves, have complained bitterly of the poor and lawless material from which they must recruit their workers, compared with the efficient and self-respecting craftsman who applied for employment twenty years ago” (Crawford 9-3). He uses the strategy of tone in this sentence to strengthen his purpose of the article. He is showing his audience a repercussion to an otherwise avoidable future, which is a depiction of the importance of the argument, if shop class were to remain in schools. The use of the strategy also invokes a response in audience in the form of urgency, as it states that the next generation is already in school, and there is another
Arvanitas 5 generation behind them. No one would want their children to become adults as, “poor and lawless material”. Rather the audience would want their children to be the, “efficient and selfrespecting” individuals, which he is stating can be taught through creating or fixing things, in essence, shop class. As Crawford’s essay progresses he begins to use the strategy of empirical evidence by citing other authors to further strengthen his argument. He cites such authors as Mike Rose in, “Blue-Collar Brilliance”, as well as Mike Eisenberg and Ann Nishioka Eisenberg in, “Shop Class for the Next Millennium”. He uses these other authors’ writing to build credibility for himself, as they are already credible, published authors, stating points parallel with his own. Any of the readers who would be familiar with either of the writers would draw a direct connection to the cognitive thinking in blue collar work (Rose) and the problem solving that goes into creating something (Mike Eisenberg and Ann Nishioka Eisenberg). In his use of the rhetorical situation he uses the emotional response of the next generation and the credibility gained through others to push the values craftsman have, and how they can also benefit our children. The authors, Mike Rose and Matthew B. Crawford wrote about the intelligence and the values of the working people. Although they used different strategies to meet their purpose with the audience, and their desired goals were different, both articles were effective in giving credit to the blue collar work force. They shed light on the importance of the trades, and the intelligence one gains through the practice of them. This effectively squelched the stereo-type that manual laborers are not as smart as office workers.
Arvanitas 6 Works Cited Rose, Mike. “The American Scholar: Blue-Collar Brilliance – Mike Rose”. The American Scholar, the Magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. John Churchill, 2009. www.theamericanscholar.org/blue-collar-brilliance/. Accessed 27 July 2017. Crawford, Matthew B. “The New Atlantis: Shop Class as Soulcraft – Matthew B. Crawford”. The New Atlantis, A Journal of Technology & Society. New Atlantis, 2006. New York: penguin Press, 2009. www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-soulcraft/. Accessed 27 July 2017. Russell, Tony, et al. "MLA Formatting and Style Guide." The Purdue OWL. Purdue U Writing Lab, 2 Aug. 2016, owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/
