A columnist and editor, David Brooks has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times and edited for the Weekly Standard, the Atlantic, and Newsweek. Brooks begins his essay with criticizing Amy Chua’s parenting with showing how hard she is on her daughters. He’s reasonable throughout but still questions Chua and calls her “soft”.
In “Amy Chua is a Wimp,” David Brooks argues that Amy Chua is too soft when it comes to parenting, leading her to ignore the importance in her children acquiring social skills, and that those skills are just as important as academic skills. Brooks begins with highlighting some cringe-worthy situations from Chua’s book. Amy Chua, a well-known “Tiger Mom,” believes western parents …show more content…
His essay makes sense from the start, but it lacks credibility. He gives evidence but not from credible sources, or further expanding his reasons. For example, Brooks starts a sentence with “Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon have found” and finishes the sentence without even expanding it. He just says that a research was conducted, but he doesn’t give names of the researchers completing it. His whole essay is filled with things he says are true, but aren’t supported by any evidence. His lack of evidence leads to Ethos, David Brooks himself is credible, but the evidence and its “sources” not so much. He lacks credible sources leading his whole essay lose some credibility. One rhetorical appeal that can clearly be found is Pathos, “There’s a reason Asian-American women between ages of 15 and 24 have such high suicide rates” and by using the statistic he makes his essay emotional by blaming Asian parenting for the suicides. Even this statistic lacks credibility since Brooks doesn’t give it a source. Brooks’ essay has logical reasons but not the evidence to support it making it lose some validity, and for the same reason he loses …show more content…
From what I read it seems like it’s easy for people to change minds after reading his essay because it made sense and we know that it is important to know what’s difficult and what isn’t.
Like Brooks said “I just wish she wasn’t so soft and indulgent” and in my opinion Brooks wasn’t being respectful throughout his essay he was suggesting that Amy Chua was lacking something important in her parenting skills. Brooks was poking at Amy Chua for being soft on her children and this would probably fall under the ad hominin fallacy. He was offering valid reasons, but at the same time disrespecting Chua. Brooks was personally attacking her by naming her a wimp. Other than that there weren’t any other noticeable logical