Running head: RHETORICAL ANALYSIS 1

Rhetorical Analysis:

The Sexual Adolescent

Sol Gordon

Chantoba Bright

The University of Texas at El Paso

RWS 1301

Dr. Vierra

March 9, 2019
RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

The adolescent of this modern generation is becoming more and more involved in sexual

activities without the proper knowledge needed to secure themselves. In this book the sexual

adolescent (1973), Sol Gordon argued that society needs to accept the fact that adolescents are

involved in sexual activities and instead help to provide information and other resources

necessary for safe practices. To support his claims, Gordon uses two rhetorical appeals: ethos

and logos, the author did not seek to manipulate the audience emotions to trigger actions but

instead relied on the power of persuasion thus he did not use pathos and to another extent it

wouldn’t be deem suitable to use pathos in a scholarly monograph. The author did extensive

research on the topic throughout his career in child psychology which boosted his credibility as a

writer for this topic. He uses for example government research data, interviews from medical

personnel's, testimonies from individuals about real life experiences and official social papers to

justify his controversial stand on this topic and to support his claims. Gordon focuses on

covering the consequences of uninformed adolescent decisions and how it can intensify with

societal neglect. He started from the depth of the issue to current days and he depicts how the

decisions of parents, society and legislations have led to issues beyond control.

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RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

Rhetorical Analysis:

The Sexual Adolescents

By Sol Gordon

Genres and rhetoric analysis affect research in different ways. In writing an effective
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rhetorical analysis, you should discuss the goal or purpose of the piece; the appeals, evidence,

and techniques used and why; examples of those appeals, evidence, and techniques; and your

explanation of why they did or didn’t work and this is exactly what Sol Gordon did in his book

called the sexual adolescent. This a book based on facts about adolescents and sexual behaviors

and consequences. In this book the author claimed that whether society accept it or not the fact is

adolescents are involved in early sexual relationships. The best way to approach this social issue

is to openly discuss the topic sex with teenagers and try to guide them down a safe path.

This is a difficult topic to address because these discussions tend to make people feel

uncomfortable and many have superficial and reverential views on it. Gordon acknowledged this

and convinced his audience by using a wide range of data, statistics, interviews from field and

government records.

Gordon covered the topic from several angles. The chapter’s names revealed the various

topics discussed by the author and showed the unusual, critical and objective perspective in the

book. The primary audience is to be parents seeking to connect with their kids on the topic of

sex, adolescents looking for valid information and other professionals that may be interested in

the contents provided in this book.

Instead of criticizing adolescents who are sexually active, Gordon provides them with

answer to popularly asked questions, guidelines on how to be safe and where to find help. He

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RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

acknowledges that the information he provided is long overdue and extremely useful because it

has made significant changes in the lives of both parents and adolescent around the world.

Discussion

According to Bullock, R., & Goggin, M. D. (2016), genres are basically various kind of

writing, letters, profiles, reports, position papers, poems, blog posts (p.61). According to Vierra

(2019), they help our writings and elaborations of various themes, by giving the audience clues

about what sort of information is likely to be found and to figure out how to read them. There are

various types of genres that help to deliver our message and create an understanding of what we

wish to convey to our audience.

One important controversy involves the role of audience. According to Ede and Lunsford

(2018) there are alternative formulation that more accurately reflects the richness of “audience”

as a concept (p.156). Audience address speaks about the concrete reality of the writer’s audience.

This is where the assumption that knowledge of the audience attitudes, beliefs and expectations

are not only possible but essential to the writer’s approach. Many of those who envision audience

as addressed have been influenced by the strong tradition of audience analysis in speech

communication and by current research in cognitive psychology on the composing process.

Audience invoked on the other hand stress that the audience of a written discourse is a

construction of the writer, a “created fiction” (long-p.225). It does not deny the physical reality

of readers but that writers simply cannot know this reality in the way that speakers can. The

central task of the writer, then, is not to analyze an audience and adapt discourse to meet its

needs. Rather, the writer uses the semantic and syntactic resources of language to provide cues

for the reader which help to define the role or roles the writer wishes the reader to adopt.

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RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

Rhetoric attempts to explain or help us understand how people interact through language

and other symbols. Rhetoric according to Aristotle is the art of seeing the available means of

persuasion. (TED, 2016). These are seen through three basic types of rhetoric; Forensic or

Judicial rhetoric(facts), Epideictic or Demonstrative rhetoric (proclamation of present situation)

and symbouleutition or deliberative rhetoric (future rhetoric). These types of rhetoric work

through three persuasive appeals: Ethos, Pathos, Logos. Ethos is how you convince the audience

with credibility, Logos is the use of logics, facts and examples to persuade the audience while

Pathos appeals to the audience emotions to evoke a decision or action. (TED, 2016, 1:50-3:24).

Wardle's and downs (2017) argued that rhetoric also attempts to explain or help us

understand how people interact through language and symbols (p.449). The attempts by rhetors

to make meaning with their audience through both words and actions require them to use these

three aforementioned persuasive appeals to find common ground or identification with their

audience; in other words, it requires them to think of what both themselves and their audience

might share as common foundational values and then get their message across using ethos, logos

and pathos in their appropriate manner in relation to the topic/message.

Ethos

The author of the sexual adolescent is credible. Ethos demonstrates the reliability,

competence and represents for the reader’s idea and values. Sol Gordon is credible to talk about

communicating with teenagers about sex because he is a thoughtful scholar and a compassionate

child psychologist. He received his doctorate in psychology from the University of London. He

served as chief psychologist at the Philadelphia Child Guidance and the Middlesex County

Mental Health Clinics. Gordon taught at Yeshiva University and Syracuse University where he

was professor of child and family studies and founding director of the Institute for Family

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Research and Education (1970-1985). Gordon is a professor emeritus, with a distinguished career

as a clinical psychologist and sex educator. Upon his retirement from Syracuse, Gordon was a

fellow of the APA, a member of the National Council of Family Relations, American

Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists, and SSSS. The author also uses

numerous parenthetical citations, making him seem “more credible because she has done the

required research in the field and has shown it through the citations”. According to Covino and

Joliffe (1995), By knowing that the author is credible enough to be writing on this subject, he can

be used as a scholarly source in research papers (p.337).

Pathos

The author doesn’t use much if any pathos at all in this book. According to Wardle's and

downs (2017), Pathos appeals to the audience emotions to evoke a decision or action (p.449).

Pathos is only to be used when the author’s desire is to “activate or draw upon the sympathies

and emotions of the auditors, causing them to attend to and accept its ideas, propositions, or calls

for action”. However, the sexual Adolescent is a book based on logics. As an academic writer

and clinical psychologist and sex educator, Dr. Gordon takes an unsympathetic approach to

dealing with the subject at hand. According to Gordon (1973) the purpose of his book is to help

parents communicate more effectively with their children about sex. (Covino & Joliffe, 1995, p.

338).

Logos

Apart from Ethos the author used logos in his Monograph. According to Spangler (1986),

Aristotle described logos as the use of logics, facts and reasoning to persuade or transfer a

message to the audience. As noted ethos relied on the credibility of the author, while logos is

logic evidence and proof used to support claims with logic by using facts, statistics, testimony,

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real life experiences of others, hypothetical examples and anecdotes along with interviews from

recognized authorities. Gordon (1973), claimed that that the less an adolescent knows about sex

the less he will “act out” is not compelling. He supports his claims with statistics, case studies,

interviews from the field, government reports and other credible data. His text has also been

peer-reviewed, because it’s published by a university press. A research conducted by Dr. Gordon

himself showed that about 300,000 babies are born out of wedlock in a year and about one-third

of those, or 100,000 are to teenagers, abortions not included. More than 50% of the marriages of

high school girls occur when the girl is pregnant and the highest divorce rates in the united states

today is among teenagers (p.xv).

Audience

The intended audience of the sexual adolescent are parents and the adolescent population.

According to Gordon (1973), the book functions on several levels both for the intended and

unintended audience. The book was written for professionals and concerned laymen- particularly

parents- who want to communicate more effectively with adolescents about sexual activity. Ede

and Lunsford (2018), claimed that there are two types of audience used in writing. Audience

address, and audience invoke both of which plays an important role in writing and speech. The

sexual adolescent uses audience address which speaks about the concrete reality of the writer’s

audience. In this case the author assumes that knowledge of audience’s attitudes, beliefs and

expectations are not only possible but essential to the writer’s approach and to the degree of

whether the audience is real or imaginary. In the book “the sexual adolescent” audience address

can be seen when the author made the statement “All children think about sex” (Assumptions

made by the author about audience attitudes) (p.10). Another instances of audiences address took

place on (p.ix) when the author said “society by operation on the assumption that adolescent

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should not have sexual relations, effectively bars them from the information they want and need

(assumed beliefs of audience by the author). This evidence clearly shows that based on the

claims made Ede and Lunsford about audiences and their roles, the author used audience address

in his book.

Conclusion

Genres and rhetoric analysis affect research. In writing an effective rhetorical analysis,

you should discuss the goal or purpose of the piece; the appeals, evidence, and techniques used

and why; examples of those appeals, evidence, and techniques; and your explanation of why they

did or didn’t work. In doing the necessary research you have to consider the appropriate genres

to use in your research and how it relates to rhetoric. Gordon can be considered as a credible

author; whose jurisdictions give him the power to write about this specific topic. He gives ample

evidence to support his claims by using a wide variety of facts, statistics, data and interviews

from the field. The author has had a long successful, academic and acclaimed career in the field

of concern, which adds to his believability. Gordon writes in an academic way without the use of

pathos, which is also essential in supporting his credibility. As an academic writer the

information found in the paper must be able to convince its audience with stone cold facts and

not through the manipulation of the audience emotions. With the knowledge that Dr. Gordon is a

credible author, it is now safe to conclude that his monograph can be used in research as a

scholarly source and that his controversial opinions are justified.

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References

Bullock, R., & Goggin, M. D. (2016). The Norton field guide to writing with readings (4th ed.).

New York: W.W. Norton.

Covino, W., & Jolliffe, D. (Eds.). (1995). Rhetoric: Concepts, definitions, boundaries. Boston:

Allyn & Bacon.

Ede, L., & Lunsford, A. (1984). Audience Addressed/Audience invoked: The Role of Audience

in Composition Theory and Pedagogy. College Composition and Communication, 35(2),

155-171. doi: 10.2307/358093.

Gordon, S. (1973). The sexual adolescent; communicating with teenagers about sex North

Scituate, Mass., Duxbury Press 1973].

Logic: An Aristotelian Approach. By MARY MICHAEL SPANGLER, 0.P. Lanham, Maryland:

University Press of America, 1986. Pp. 270.

Stuart H. Shapiro, M.D., M.P.H. Co-Director, Cambridge Port Medical Clinic, Cambridge,

Massachusetts; Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts.

TED-Ed.(publisher), & Camille A. Langston (2016, September 20). How to use rhetoric to get

what you want. Retrieved February 07, 2019, from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KLMM9BKW5o

Vierra, P.J. (RWS 1301, lecture, January 23, 2019).

Vierra, P.J. (RWS 1301, PowerPoint, January 23, 2019).

Wardle, E., & Downs, D. (Ed.). (2017). Writing about writing: A college reader. Boston:

Bedford/St. Martin.

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