Journal Entry 3 - "Residence Halls"

In her “Residence Halls” piece, Kelley McCormick relays her argument very confidently to prove the fallacies and misleading ideas that Miami presents about residence hall living. She uses ethos, logos, and pathos to strongly support her claim that, dorm life isn’t properly represented by the brochures and letters that Miami University gives out to urge students to live on campus.

For example, I thought her argument on how “personalizing your room with posters, carpeting, matching bedspreads and drapes” was a pathos fallacy, to be very convincing. She explains how the brochure tries to lure students in through their emotions by reassuring them that they can represent their own personalities by living in a dorm that can become their own “personalized” space. I thought this was a strong point, because feeling comfortable when first arriving to school is what is most important to students. So, for the brochure to advertise dorm rooms as being potential personalized spaces, it is without a doubt an appeal to the incoming student’s emotions.

I also found her argument to be convincing when she discussed how the brochure only appeals to incoming first-year students, but to the rest of the student body it’s a brochure filled with meaningless falsehoods. She goes on to discuss how unless the student reading the brochure has lived in a dorm and had to walk a long ways to class, or has had to eat the so called “excellent” food, than he or she is going to find the brochure as nothing but a comforter that residence hall living is idealistic. Upperclassmen have lived in dorms before so they know the true realities of what it is like to live in one, strongly making McCormick’s argument, that the brochure is only believable to future students, easily credible.

While, there are several instances in McCormick’s piece that make her argument convincing, at times she can be too forceful and show too much of her own beliefs and opinion, which for me can be misleading. In order, to believe someone’s argument, that person must not only provide support for their claim, but they also have to contain some of their emotions that may be too strong and throw the reader off. For example, McCormick makes it clear how her couples of months in a dorm were miserable and not at all what she expected; however, who is to say that every student feels the same way? By eliminating opinions that are too personalized, McCormick could have made her piece much stronger.

Overall, McCormick delivered a well analyzed piece of writing that could potentially provide great insight for readers. By simply removing her feelings of disappointment that were too strong at times, her contention could have been even more persuasive and formidable.