Logos Evaluation

Essay #1: Evaluating King’s Use of Logos and Pathos   For your first essay, you will do the following things over the course of your body paragraphs in order to evaluate how Martin Luther King Jr. uses logos and pathos in his argument “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:   Summarize King’s specific argument for why it is sometimes justified to break the law. Capture his main premises and quote the text. To assist your eventual logos evaluation, number the premises for clarity, such as “King’s first premise is . . . His second premise is . . .”  Your goal is to be accurate, clear, and thorough (This entire summary will be one body paragraph total. Note: You are not summarizing the whole letter. You are only summarizing one specific part of it about being justified breaking some laws.) Evaluate each of the main premises that you summarize in body paragraph 1. Answer whether each main premise seems true or not and whether it is relevant to his main conclusion about breaking the law being justified or not. Be methodical, bring in new supporting examples or counterexamples of your own to back up your ideas, and explain and support your evaluation as specifically as you can. Devote a separate body paragraph to each main premise to ensure that you look at each premise carefully (how many body paragraphs you spend on this logos evaluation depends on how many different main premises you find in your summary. For example, if you find three separate premises in your summary, you will need three separate paragraphs here. If you find two, then two, and so on). Now evaluate one way King uses pathos in his overall letter. Identify one aspect pathos (such as metaphor, word choice, or visual language), and compare and contrast King’s use of pathos with how Coates uses pathos with that same technique in the excerpt from Between the World and Me. Who uses that pathos technique better and why? (Feel free to include material you already wrote about Coates in Online Project #1.) Finally evaluate one more way King uses pathos in his overall letter. Identify one, new aspect pathos (such as metaphor, word choice, or visual language, something different than the previous paragraph), and compare and contrast King’s use of pathos with how Coates uses pathos with that same technique in the excerpt from Between the World and Me. Who uses this pathos technique better and why?  There is no specific page length requirement nor limit for this essay. There is no specific word count length or limit for this paper either. The paragraphs should be detailed, clear, and well supported, but otherwise, make the essay as long as it needs to be to be excellent. Do you need a Works Cited page? If all you use is King and Coates (and my lectures), the answer is no. I gave you those readings, and so though I want you to cite them all, I know exactly what they are and where they came from. And to be clear, King and Coates are all you are required to use, too.  But you may elect to add extra outside sources, maybe for examples, maybe for data you want to use, who knows what. Whatever those outside sources may be, you must cite them too and then include a Works Cited page listing what the sources are.