David Thomas

During persuasive writing pieces authors try to make you see their point of view as valid. Often times during this process, their writing is compromised by the errors they make to prove their point. David Thomas makes many errors in his essay "The Mind of a Man." In his thesis he tries to prove that women are not smarter than men as previously believed, but instead that they just excel at different tasks. However, throughout his whole essay, he describes that boys are discouraged by female teachers and does not stick to his thesis. He showed a biased point of view that he supported with only anecdotal evidence and studies that contained no numbers or statistics. Also, his use of emotion in his essay showed his anger towards others views that
She said, "If girls achieve higher standards than boys, it is not the result of sympathetic female teachers: it is that boys fail to be motivated because of their attitude to women. Boy's early experience is almost entirely one of a society which regards women's traditional roles as trivial, dull and second-rate and dismisses their opinions. If girls have a positive role model in the female teacher, they will do better than boys. But if boys, unencumbered by society's prejudices, valued their female teachers, then their progress would match that of girls"(223). Obviously Cosker felt strongly about her point and proved an alternative explanation to Mooneys as well as Thomas' theory of female teachers being the cause of the boys lower grades. Thomas uses sarcasm as well to make his anger known. In reaction to her letter, he states "Heaven forbid that they [boys] should be given any consideration or compassion. Heaven forbid that the prejudices of the new age should be challenged. If you ever doubted that feminists have taken over from apoplectic old colonels as the great reactionaries of society, just read this letter"(224). If you read between the lines of his sarcasm, you begin to see just what he is implying. He is implying that she didn't give boys any compassion or consideration
In his thesis, he used a quote from Dr. John Nicholson saying that the IQ scores from men and women were "indistinguishable" (221), and the only difference is that they were just better at different sort of tasks. Meanwhile, his whole entire essay attacked the fact that female teachers don't support the boys and that caused their lower grades. So the information he provided did not support his thesis. Also he ends the conclusion with a strange statement that seem to signify a new thesis. His concluding sentence, "When Yoda sat on his rock in The Empire Strikes Back and told Luke Skywalker that he had to choose between the dark force and the light, he knew what he was talking about" (225), seemed to make little sense and had nothing to do with his essay. In writing his essay, he should've considered his audience and that some people who did not see the movie would not understand what he was implying, besides that statement seemed more like an opening line rather than a concluding