Karen Plascencia
Dr. Joe Puterbaugh
English 101
11-03-12
Essay –Analysis of Rhetorical Strategies
Rebecca Skloot’s book Rebecca Skloot’s book is an extraordinary and interesting book that narrates the live of Henrietta Lacks. The women who suffered from cervical cancer and later on died because of it. Doctors took out her cells without her family consents. Without knowing that those cells never die and the Doctors were getting multimillionaires. This book is really fascinating because it has several examples of how Henrietta Lacks used to live. Rebecca Skloot uses a rhetorical strategy to make this book even more real, she gives several supporting evidence when she spent few hours researching and trying to locate her family. She also, makes us feel what she feels about Henrietta Lacks and her family by explaining each moment of Henrietta’s life when she was alive and how this situation affected the family and she uses a clear tone to explain us how hard it was for Henrietta Lacks to be black and sick in those times and no getting the same treatment as whites. These strategies are: Logos, pathos and ethos. Rebecca Skloot uses logos in this book because she gives us supporting evidence about Henrietta Lacks. Since she was in school she heard about Hela cells, how they were reproducing every single minute and never die, but she was interested to know who was the person whom they took out the cells from. She asked to her teacher about the name of the person and her teacher told her the name, so she looked in the computer and never found out the person. The name was wrong; her real name was Henrietta Lacks. When she was about to graduate from university she had this idea to write about this women so she began to contact people to get information. Finally when she found out the daughter of Henrietta Lacks, that’s when her journal started. By giving us logos she makes us feel more interested to know more about who Henrietta was and what happened with her cells. Another strategy that Rebecca Skloot uses is pathos, she makes us feel what she feels about Henrietta Lacks and her family. The whole situation about how without Henrietta’s family consent the Doctors took out her cells and began to get money. When the family was unable to afford a doctor. One example is when Debora explains what she feels in page 9. Deborah explains how she just wanted to know who her mother was; she knew that they took out her mother cells and that’s it. Because of this situation her father didn’t want to talk about Henrietta, so Deborah didn’t know whom her mother was. Many friends and close relatives from Henrietta didn’t want to talk about Henrietta anymore because they were tired about the lies and they were mad about what they did to Henrietta’s body without their consent. That’s why Rebecca decided to investigate more about Henrietta’s live. Rebecca Skloot uses pathos in this book to let us know how complicated was for the family to know what happened to Henrietta. Consequently, Rebecca Skloot uses a clear tone and true examples of Henrietta’s live, which is ethos. She tells us how hard it was for Henrietta to be black and sick in those times when blacks couldn’t receive the same treatments as whites. Henrietta said that she was felling something inside of her, so she told the doctors at John Hopkins, but they told her that she had nothing and that she was okay. When that wasn’t true at all, she was getting worse and that’s when the doctors began to believe in her. In those times blacks did not interrogate or correct doctors about what they found on them. They just went home with the only information they received even though they couldn’t understand it. “ At that point, more than 15,000 women were dying each year from cervical cancer”(Skloot 29). Many women were dying because doctors didn’t know how to interpret the results accurately because they didn’t know what the stages of cervical cancer were. Tragic story because Henrietta died without raising her kids. Rebecca Skloot gives us ethos in many parts from the book, and one of them is this, she wanted to tell us how Henrietta lived before she died. In conclusion, Rebecca Skloot gives us Logos, pathos and ethos in this interesting book. I believe that she did a great job because every moment that I read this book I feel what she is trying to tell us. She gives us a lot of supportive evidence and she wrote everything that she passed through while she was doing her research. She wrote how this whole situation affected the family and every problem that they passed through. Finally, she tells us how blacks were treated in the 50’s and that most of them went to John Hopkins. “The public wards at Hopkins were filled with patients, most of them black and unable to pay their medical bills”(Skloot 15). That was the only option they had, so Henrietta Lacks went to that hospital and that’s the place where she died. If none of this strategies were used in this book, the story will not be interesting at all because the way Rebecca tell us every detail is amazing and makes us to read more and more.

Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway, 2010, 2011. Print