Blog Post #5

Kristof begins his essay "Where Sweatshops Are A Dream"  by painting a picture of a place that he describes as a “Dante-like vision of hell”, where people dream of working in sweatshops instead of rummaging through piles of hot smoldering garbage for anything that might fetch a penny. The problem he identifies is, many countries want to wage war on sweatshops, however in some of the poorest areas of the world, working in a sweatshop is a dream job. Kristof assumes his readers are blind to the fact that places like this exist, or either don’t want to admit it.

His purpose in this essay is to bring awareness that in some poverty-stricken countries sweatshops are a means to a better life. In order to accomplish this purpose, he appeals mainly to the emotions of the reader, describing children digging through piles of smoking trash to find plastic to sell for five cents a pound.
In his essay, Kristof addresses the main argument against his thesis, the idea that sweatshops are harmful and immoral. He refutes this argument by saying that for many families, it is their only hope of escaping poverty.


Finally, he concludes by making the point that this would not remain the case if these countries grew their manufacturing business and offered real jobs. Overall, the argument Kristof makes is effective because it makes the reader picture these young children digging through trash, dreaming of a time that they might be in the shade of a sweatshop sitting in front of a sewing machine.

Comments

  1. Gracen MillerOctober 11, 2017 at 2:49 PM

    Your rhetorical analysis on Kristof's argumentative article has a quality level of 4. This is because your response touched on all four sections; introduction, summary, analysis, and concluding statement by referring to most or all of the parts in each of those sections.

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