Ethos / Resistance to Civil Government

English 11 - Today, we worked with Henry David Thoreau's Resistance to Civil Government.  Students worked on summarizing a short passage by themselves and then collaborated with students who had also worked on the same passage.  This reading ended up being more difficult than I predicted so we scheduled extra time the next day to focus on it in detail.  The essay is primarily Thoreau's reflection on being thrown in jail for not paying the poll tax that went to support the continuance of slavery and the Mexican American War.  Thoreau's writing can be dense and dated, but his arguments can be heard all the time in modern American speeches.  Thoreau argued that all governments should be striving to govern as little as possible - that they should be working in a way that all people would voluntarily follow the rules because it was in their own best interest and that a government should seek to do little enforcement.  He saw the wars and policies of the American government of his time as being either immoral or in the best interest of a few and believed that his disobedience allowed him to protest the errant policies of his time.

Here is a video that provides some background on the Mexican American War that might help you understand better what Thoreau was so upset about:



AP - We started off by looking at how we could best incorporate short, simple sentences and fragments into our writing.  Contrary to what many students are told, fragments can be used in writing as long as they are used effectively.  In fact, many of our most famous political speeches make use of fragments as a way to emphasize major ideas.  To conclude the activity, we revised a past essay to look at how incorporating fragments and short, simple sentences could make arguments even stronger.  We spent the second part of the class focusing on the appeal to ethos.  The appeal to ethos is the part of the speaker's argument where she attempts to convince the audience that she is trustworthy and reliable.  As I pointed out to the students, one of the biggest parts of running for public office is appealing to ethos.  Frequently, our contemporary media focuses less on getting speakers to discuss policy at length and instead on cultivating images of themselves as likeable and trustworthy.

This video from The New York Times provides some insight into just how much work can go into the appeal to ethos that a candidate might make.