Rhetorical Analysis Essay Sample

Elizabeth Warren in her article “The vanishing Middle Class” explores to convince readers that the middle class is on the verge of collapsing. She uses comparison, contrast and irony to make her work captivating and convincing.
Elizabeth Warren starts her article by attempting to describe the middle class in order to captivate her readers thus increasing the urge to read the entire article. She argues that middle class is not determined by the government. She further states that other factors such as income, lifestyle, beliefs, education and feelings help in defining middle class.
After making her introduction, Elizabeth embarks on using irony. She is of the opinion that the middle class spends more than they earn thus leading to their financial constraints. This is because they spend their money on unnecessary things like buying expensive clothes in order to fit in their social circles. She argues despite the fact that we find that both parents are working in a modern family, they cannot afford to match the high cost of living.
Midway in her article, Elizabeth applies the use of comparison to express her opinion about how life used to be in 1970 as compared to 2003. This style is aimed at helping the reader to fully understand her argument about why middle class will be vanishing soon and why there would be only two classes in the United States. In her article she argues that back then in 1970 people were more financially stable irrespective of the fact that men were the breadwinners an aspect which she has linked to the fact that the expenses were flexible and the salaries earned would be enough thus leaving some money to save up.
This reasoning has been founded on the fact that people in the current generation who form the middle class are very extravagant due to the need for elegance which in most instances is associated with spending a lot of money. For instance, families in the 1970s did not see the value of having more than one car and elegant designer clothes. In this era however, many families own more than one car and dress up in expensive clothes thus lowering their saving abilities. This explains why she argues that life is risky in the modern society especially if a case of unemployment occurs unexpectedly.
She further uses contrast to show why the middle class is on the verge vanishing by using some data .Being a bankruptcy lawyer its evident that she is well versed with various issues which affect the society and the middle class. Her data indicates that service charges have been increasing over the years. She states in her article that housing rates, insurance costs, car expenses and children maintenance have been on the rise since 1970. Based on this reasoning, she defends the middle class by expressing that the rise in services charges is to blame for the financial instability of the middle class .
In order to expound on this point and enable the readers to understand her position, she presents the situation where a modern middle class family has to own two cars on order to enable them to have two jobs .This is in addition to them not being able to acquire new cars more often. This indicates that even though middle class families spend, they still are not to blame for the financial instabilities affecting them.
In conclusion, what Elizabeth has written in her article is interestingly very real. Many people in the United States have expressed their opinions in regard to her article and they have confessed that indeed what she has stated is actually what is happening to them. Some have even stated that they belonged to the middle class but currently they do not belong there anymore because they are poor thus confirming Elizabeth’s argument that the middle class is vanishing.