Flannery O'Connor and Francine Prose
             The piece by Flannery O'Connor Fiction Is a Subject with a History-It Should Be Taught That Way, and the piece by Francine Prose, I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read both depicts several reasons why students these days lack the interest in reading. Both authors of the used anecdotes to put across their message to the audience. Both authors also used ethos, logos as well as rhetorical appeal to convey the message illustrated in their pieces.
             Flannery O'Connor and Francine Prose similar techniques to demonstrate the ideas they are presenting. For example, O'Connor states that two cases in Georgia that support her claim that childrens attention can be held with stories that reflect their own time period. She also uses ethos, when she stated that "parents have objected to their eighth and ninth grade children's reading assignments in modern fiction...Sometimes, as in one of the Georgia cases, the teacher is dismissed and hackles rise in liberal circles everywhere." Flannery O'Connor uses logos when a character in Flannery O'Connor's piece, Mr. Heresy states that " 'his book is not scandalous, that it attempts to convey an earnest message about the nature of democracy, and that it falls within the limits of the principle of "total effects.'" This shows that the author of this comment believes that books are chosen in order to teach the students about social facts. Fancine Prose also uses anecdotes to support her claim that the books that the students are currently reading in school are "dreary". She claims, "My own two sons, now twenty-one and seventeen, have read Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and Melville. But the've also slogged repeatedly through the manipulative melodramas of Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, through sentimental, middlebrow favorite, the weaker novels of John Steinbeck, and the fantasies of
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