Caleb C.

asked • 12/22/15

I need help! write a paragraph about how smoking can negatively affect the health of others.

 Its for a persuasive essay

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Mike S. answered • 12/22/15

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Consider one that tells the story of someone who is suffering the effects of smoking, with the final sentence being of them lighting another cigarette. A story of a single case can be much more persuasive than stats and numbers. A single death is a tragedy, but millions are but a statistic, to butcher a quote by someone more famous than I. You get the point.
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Ed M.

Caleb, Mike S. gives you a really good suggestion here about the rhetorical effectiveness of focusing on a single individual (it relates well to what Nora B. wrote about "pathos" in her answer to one of your posts), but from your other two posts about this particular essay assignment (numbers 174149 and 174165; I'd give the full hyperlinks to them here, but I've discovered that you can't include Web links in these comments on other people's answers) it appears that what you're really after for this paragraph is something more objective, that is, since in post 174149 you indicated that your introduction to the essay will include the clause "Studies show that smoking can negatively affect the health of others around you," your reader will expect you to expound on this point. And unfortunately, the problem is that there have a been a ton of scientific analyses of the effects of secondhand smoke that have been conducted over several decades, so it would really be difficult for you even to begin to summarize all these studies in a single paragraph, or even two. So perhaps you should not only make your argument in this paragraph more personal, i.e., more of a case study as Mike suggests, but also change the whole approach of the persuasion in your essay and personalize it, that is, have it less a rote recitation of all the general statistics and arguments about smoking and focus on how it will negatively affect the life of a single individual in the ways you mention in your introductory paragraph, i.e., on the health of others in the individual's life, on his/her finances and on the surroundings she/he lives in every day.
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12/23/15

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