A Rhetorical Analysis Of 'Graduation' By Maya Angelou

Reaching To Nowhere Eric Hoofer once said “Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.” Many times in life we end disappointed to the point we see no hope in tomorrow and often view ourselves as failures. Disappointments are tools that God made for us to lead us to our path and make us who we are today. “Graduation” by “ Maya Angelou” teaches us a story of life and how it can be disappointing at times, Angelou uses a diploma as a sign of victory and success but her feeling does not last that long. Maya used in her article many writing strategies to make it clear and effective to her readers, such as Pathos and details which made her article strong. Angelou uses Logos in the beginning of her article, she never states that she is graduating 8th grade. She does that to make sure people won’t drop her text, most cases people do not want to hear a story of an 8th grader who is about to graduate, many of us will ask ourselves what have an 8th grader done so far in her life? Angelou’s essay is about fighting race and destroying boundaries in her community. She also starts her essay
The white men’s speech was very hard for Angelou to digest. “ The men’s dead words fell like bricks around the auditorium and too many settled in my belly”(76). The white man’s words were very hard and disappointing to Angelou, she felt that she was in the sky and all of sudden she fell on the ground, her excitement is ruined and she feels all she accomplished and her hard work went in vain. She also describes how that speech changed her life. “ My name had lost its ring of familiarity and I had to be nudged to go and receive my diploma”(77). How can someone forget their name unless they been so dramatized and she defineltly used pathos and makes her reader get that certain feeling of I am not who I was and my life is the same, also a sense of