Forms of appeal

Beth Macy uses a well-balanced combination of all three forms of appeal in her article “‘I Am Going to Die if I Keep Living the Way I Am.’ She Was Right.”

Note that Macy’s use of forms of appeal may also be useful to refer to when you describe “how the writer conveys her attitude to the issues explored”, a focus point in the exam assignment from May 20th 2019.

Logos

The clearest examples of logos in the article appears when Macy directly shares statistics about opioid addiction and the various treatment options available to handle it. She uses this data to support her point that M.A.T. is often preferable to abstinence-based treatment and ought to be more widely available.

For example, Macy notes that “Suboxone [...] and methadone prevent the suffering of withdrawal and extend lives by cutting overdose deaths in half or more compared with abstinence-based programs alone” (ll. 34-36). This is a compelling argument for making such treatment more widely available.

She then expands upon this argument by sharing statistics which show that access to M.A.T. is currently very limited: “Nationwide, only about one in five opioid users gets maintenance drugs, and even in states like Mas...