Week_11_4/8/2016_"Stop Being Politically Correct"

For this blog post, I decided to do a rhetorical analysis on the article from the Huffington Post titled Stop Being Politically Correct.  This article is not written for a very academic or formal audience, and takes a stance that some would consider ignorant.  I personally agree with this article, but wish it could have been written more formally. 
Those who are reading this article are most likely repeat readers of the Huffington Post, which I feel is an audience that wouldn't be interested in reading an article as informal, short, and full of slang as this one.  An example of this informal writing is the last line of the article, which reads "So let’s do it. Let’s stop being politically correct. What’s next?" (Havel np).
However, as I mentioned above, I do think that the message this article is conveying is an important one.  
The bulk of the appeal in this article is pathos.  This is because the point of this article is to show that political correctness is mean to help people be more respectful to those who are different than you, but instead it often does the opposite.  The author points out that a call to stop political correctness isn't a call to stop being polite, kind, tolerant, and caring.  This argument is pathos with some logos because it is appealing to your conscience, which is pathos, while using basic reasoning, which is logos.  Havel uses pathos also to make the reader look back on times where they could have been more respectful.  She makes a direct appeal to emotion when she says that we often "put down others in order to raise ourselves up" (Havel, np).  
This article fails to use ethos as appeal.  I personally do not think that the addition of ethos to this article would make it any better because the reasoning is coming from within the reader, not persuasion coming from a credible source.  For instance, Havel asks readers "What happened to agreeing to disagree?" (Havel, np).  This question is aimed to make readers make a decision on their own, not be led to it by someone else.  
Over all, this article does a wonderful job at convincing the reader to thin differently about something that they might not consider very often.  However, I feel that this article doesn't do a wonderful job at reaching the right audience by being in the Huffington Post.  The audience that this article should be appealing to is a younger audience, or a more informal one.  This article could have been much more well received if it was put on site that appeals to a younger audience, or written better for the audience of the site it was posted on.  

Havel, Erin.  "Stop Being Politically Correct!".  The Huffington Post.  9 December 2015.  Web. 8 April 2016.