The credibility of the speaker is an essential element of any argument, and credibility is derived from one or more of several factors, including a relationship of trust between speaker and audience, or a recognized personal authority on a certain subject, derived subsequently either from personal experience or extensive education. A podiatrist is credible when talking about feet because he has both the education and personal experience to back his claims. A soldier has credibility when discussing war because she has lived it. A writer has credibility on the subject of language because it flows in his veins. From these examples it can be surmised that credibility must be earned, and that this is not a task rapidly achieved. In the essays Serving …show more content…
Immediately Eighner has the sympathy and trust of his audience. The experiences he tells of are from his own life, one which he had no choice in living. In the opening of his essay On Dumpster Diving, Eighner begins by saying “as my savings ran out, I put almost all my sporadic income into rent. The necessities of daily life I began to extract from Dumpsters” (147). In contrast to Ehrenreich’s tale of stepping into the shoes of a service worker, the audience hears from Eighner a story with real potency, and once which is built of truth and from the pressure of the moment. “Yes, we ate from Dumpsters,” Eighner says, opening himself up to his audience with what could be seen as an embarrassing statement. He trusts his audience, both to understand his motives and reasoning, and also not to judge him for the actions he was forced to resort to. In the following pages of the essay Eighner explains the methods he used to ensure that he got only the best from dumpsters, and that he protected himself from the dangers of the task. Explaining that the essential question to answer was “Why was this discarded?” set the scene for the examination of his routines and personal knowledge of the dumpster system (147). It wasn’t from any desire to discover something new that Eighner turned to dumpsters as a source of sustenance, but from necessity. Through telling a personal story of the trials he endured while on the streets Eighner earned credibility with his audience, building trust and authority through personal experience and honesty. The appeal to ethos necessary to carry Eighner’s message was fulfilled by his observably authoritative position in discussing dumpster diving because he had lived his story