“On Compassion” by Barbara Lazear Ascher focuses on where compassion comes from. While Ascher ultimately believes that people are not necessarily born with compassion but rather it is learned through experience, she also brings up the point that it is ultimately hard to tell what drives people to be compassionate and to what extant. I feel like Ascher focuses a lot on pathos in her essay. She paints a vivid picture of the message she is trying to tell about compassion and really attracts the reader by exposing them to the scenes and therefore willed into feeling compassion themselves. In Maya Angelou’s essay “Graduation” she writes about her graduation day and how proud she is of her academic achievements, only to have a guest speaker knock