Analysis of Project 3 - Research Paper

The project 3 research paper objective was to be able to understand and use primary and secondary research in order to construct a well-written research paper in MLA format. We were allowed to chose any topic we liked, so I decided to chose a topic near and dear to my heart: the effects of alcoholism and how to reduce the occurrence of this disease. This is a relevant topic because college is often the age when most people/students begin to experiment with and abuse alcohol which can end up developing into the serious, life-long disease of alcoholism. I have also had experience dealing with this disease in my family, so the topic captured my interest. As I conducted my research for this paper, I mainly found the information that I used in books from the library or Internet sources. During the research process, I made it my goal to answer my research question: "How does alcoholism affect the alcoholic and those around the alcoholic, and why/how can the occurrence of the disease be reduced?" Through the research that I found, I decided to focus the main points of my paper on the negative physical impacts that alcoholism has on the alcoholic, drunk driving, and the affects that alcoholic parents have on the emotional and psychological well-being of children of alcoholics. As I put all of my research and knowledge into paper form, I also made sure to include the modes of rhetoric, such as ethos, pathos, logos, and exigency/kairos.
My research paper successfully portrayed the rhetoric devices of ethos and logos through the research that I conducted. I made sure to use recent and credible sources and cite the sources internally as well as in a works cited page; thus ethos is found in my paper. It is important to include the rhetorical device of ethos in a research paper because the reader wants to know that the information that they are reading about is true and reliable. Logos was also present in this paper because I incorporated a lot of facts and statistics about alcoholism based on the research that I did. The rhetorical device of logos is necessary to use in a research paper because the goal of a research paper is to inform the reader of a topic by using evidence of facts to back up your claims. Pathos, the emotional appeal, was used in my paper because I talked about the negative impacts that alcoholism can have on others. For example, I used phrases such as, "alcoholism can also effect the innocent bystanders" or "the affects that alcoholism have on children of alcoholics is devastating." I mainly used this form of rhetoric when discussing drunk driving and the affects that alcoholism has on children of alcoholics because the point I wanted to get across to the reader is that alcoholism impacts a lot more people than just the alcoholic themselves, and that is why it is such a terrible and widespread issue in society. Finally, exigency/kairos kind of goes along with the pathos that I used in my piece because I constantly reminded my reader of the negative impacts of alcoholism throughout the piece. Therefore, I was trying to tell the reader that alcoholism is a dangerous and unfortunate disease to have. My goal was to prevent the reader from developing alcoholism by informing them of the many negative impacts that the disease causes.