America’s Wandering Families Analysis

America’s Wandering Families by Loretta Schwartz-Nobel is an emotional piece about the growing number of homeless families in the United States. I really enjoyed this article because it is very human. While many articles that we’ve read focus greatly on statistics this article was very emotional and made you feel for the people; they were more than just numbers on a page they had faces, names, and stories like the rest of us. This kept me incredibly interested throughout the article and was a great strategy to keep Nobel’s readers engaged. This great deal of emotion meant that the article was filled pathos catered to anyone who sympathizes for people going through hardship making it a pretty good use considering there aren’t many who don’t sympathize with that. In this sense I think that the author really did a great job of making a one-size-fits-all article. She made an article that can be understood by most by most people and she gets them to see her way of thinking not so much by stating a multitude of claims and proving them, but simply by getting her readers to feel for the homeless in their community and all across the U.S. Because of the mass use of logo in this article there is not a lot of room for logos. While this is true and for many can be crippling when convincing a reader towards your way of thinking, it does not seem to matter as much for this article. The emotion in this article is heartwarming at times, but turns on a dime to absolutely crushing because it really makes you feel for these homeless families and a great amount of facts and statistics would just take away from that, it would leave the reader feeling desensitized to the whole ordeal to a point.  

The author adds herself as a character in this article as well, which adds to the way that she convinces her reader. This is the ethos part of the argument. We see the author researching and really making and effort to get to know the people that she meets, which makes the reader feel as if she knows what she’s talking about.