Cover Letter
Dear reader, My purpose of writing this essay is to decide whether Anne Feldman’s article, “STEAM Rising: Why we need to put the arts into STEM education,” was effective, ineffective, or both. I came to the conclusion that she was effective. I believe I did an effective job at analyzing Feldman’s article by analyzing her sources she uses as evidence and breaking down how she uses a personal anecdote to use in order to use the rhetorical appeals to persuade her audience. At first when this paper was assigned to me I was terrified by the idea of starting it but as I moved along in the process it became apparent to me that writing is not a scary process. After struggling I became attached and writing became quite pleasant, but stressing none the less. The toughest part about this essay was definitely begging it and ending it. The easiest was writing the third body paragraph since it includes a personal experience. Since I am biased towards my grade I would reward my self with an A and although someone else might not think it is I wont go lower because part of my lifestyle is to never put my self down. In this essay I focused on capitalization. In the future I hope to improve on my grammar. I look forward to see my writing improve this year!

STEAM vs. STEM
“STEAM Rising: Why we need to put the arts into STEM education,” authored by Anne Feldman, an article whose purpose is to push the audience, those invested in the hard sciences and educators, to integrate the arts into the academic disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math, also known as STEM. Feldman addresses a flaw in STEM education being that it is subject-centric, where subjects study determine your career accordingly. She argues that the addition of arts would shift STEM to a people-centric field, where students personality and individuality are heavily valued, meaning you can be a digital artist and a coder simultaneously. Her goal is to get STEM students to approach situations with design thinking, defined as “a method of meeting people’s needs and desires in a technologically feasible and strategically viable way,” by the Harvard Business Review (qtd. in Feldman). The STEAM movement has been gaining momentum recently; money is being granted to schools for the development of STEAM facilities. Although Slate.com, the website where Feldman’s article was published, is set up in a manner where enticing article links make it difficult to focus on her argument; Anne Feldman effectively uses supporting evidence via well-researched sources and personal experiences, while using others to contradict STEAM critics. Through the rhetorical strategy of effective evidence Feldman is appealing to logos as well as the reader’s sense of reason. Feldman is quick to establish the magnitude at which STEAM advancements are being made. She claims that in May alone 27 schools in Pennsylvania where granted $530,000 for the growth of STEAM facilities. Feldman later improves our understanding of what STEAM facilities are by using Boston Arts Academy’s STEAM lab, as an example where they have: TVs, projectors, tablets, laser cutters, customized desktop, 3-D printers and circuit boards. Feldman gets this information form Bizjournals.com, which gains its ethos from being the top hit for the Google search: business magazine. A leading argument against the addition of the arts into STEM, a field people believe lacks engagement, is that the arts should remain separate because it would take away from the hard sciences. An essay written by Gary S. May, argues that the addition of the arts to STEM would dilute the focus on the hard sciences. Feldman counters the critic by arguing that STEAM has to be looking at as a whole and not its individual subjects. If looked at, as a whole the addition of the arts would not be distracting from the hard sciences but instead sparking students’ ideas, consequently enhancing the hard sciences. Personal anecdotes are an effective rhetorical strategy, especially since they have the potential to encompass the basic 3 rhetorical appeals that grant argument effectiveness. Feldman effectively establishes her ethos by being published on Slate.com, a daily general interest, awarded website whose publications provide analysis on a variety of topics. To further establish ethos Feldman uses a personal anecdote where she establishes herself as an A student, in the text “As an A student” (Feldman). Being an A student allows her to reach a higher level of ethos since being an A student shows a higher level of intelligence and knowledge. The anecdote she uses, where she criticizes the education system at the time she attended K-12 to show how the integration of the arts into the hard sciences would have benefited her, uses logos by appealing to the use of an example. Feldman appeals to her audience’s emotions, known as pathos, in order to draw her readers and help them connect to her argument. At the time when Feldman attended school STEM hadn’t been established and the idea of studying anything with art in the title was alien. Reflecting on her high school and college experience Feldman realized that she had made a mistake by following the norm and taking classes such as calculus instead of arts studio. Through the eyes of retrospect Feldman effectively deploys the rhetorical strategy of sympathy. The use of sympathy is effective because it allows her audience to connect with her argument through pity for her. She also evokes a feeling of uncertainty for her audience and their life choices. She uses the emotion of uncertainty to express that individuals should follow their path and not the norms structured by society; in her case, not pursing art and design oriented courses. By saying “It wasn’t until after college, when I found myself creatively dissatisfied and wondering why I majored in economics,” Feldman instills her audience with fright that they may have not pursued the career path they wanted, but instead the path that society wanted. Feldman follows with her experience in a continuing education class she took called Product Design where, “Every class meeting was about problem solving, collaborating, and generating ideas. It was about using a variety of skills and subjects to invent products. We used math without thinking about the numbers, from scaling to modeling products to meticulously drafting prototypes with precise angles and measurements” (Feldman). This experience shows here audience that it’s never to late to pursue something, just like it’s never to late to add the arts into STEM. Taking away from the effectiveness of Feldman’s argument, are distractions in the article and the surrounding web page. As a preface to the article there is an announcement to a design event. The announcement begins with “On Wednesday, June 17, Future Tense” (Feldman). Before one realizes that Future Tense is a partner of Slate.com who explore emerging technologies, the fact that Future Tense can be misinterpreted as a verb tense can cause confusion, thus drawing away from her argument. On the margins of the web page there are many enticing articles that can be distracting and reduce the effectiveness due to the disruption of the articles flow (Figure 1). Not only do they have links to articles on their website but also have links to websites such as: Wired.com and Nymag.com. As a student diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, the luring articles, most tempting of all being The New Poster for Star Wars: The Force Awakens Is Here, proved to be a distraction. In fact the links were so distracting for me that I had to copy and paste the article into a word document in order to focus on the text. Feldman does an effective job in persuading her audience that the integration of the arts into STEM would be beneficial. She does this by encompassing the three major rhetorical appeals, trough the uses of effective evidence and personal anecdotes. The true test for effectiveness is time; the path STEM will take well be seen in the future. This effective article is a good indicator that STEAM advancements will be made.

Appendix
Figure 1:

Works Cited