Ellen Goodman Columnist Essay

Ellen Goodman, a Pulitzer prize winning columnist, author, speaker, and commentator who refuses to call herself a pundit. Ellen has long been a chronicler of social change in America, especially the women’s movement and effects on our public, private lives, and has spent most of her life chronicling social change and its impact on American life. As a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist she was one of the first women to open up the pages to women’s voices and became, according to Media Watch, the most widely syndicated progressive columnist in the country. Proof of her strong passion for impacts on an average American life, her column titled “Dispensing Morality” shows just that. In her column, she expresses how those in professions and careers should reserve the right to distribute drugs or anything that has the ability to harm someone, even if it’s intentions is to aid, if the decision on handing it out conflicts with their ethics, morals, and values. She uses scenarios of situation like those and rhetorical questions to prove a point based on ethos with a tad bit of pathos; while she uses statistics of a considerable amount of claims, facts, expert opinions to appeal to the reader’s logos. She ends of this column saying: “..last time I looked, the pharmacist's license did not include the right to dispense morality.” Matching the last word with exact title of her column gives it a serious conclusion displaying how serious she is about the subject. In another column of Goodman’s, “Those Poor College Conservatives” she boldly evinces how politics does not only have a monumental spotlight as the nation as its theatre, but it also has a college level arena where students can take the initial stand of having grand debates as would senators and other officials perform when running for office of any kind. Here she uses statistics of how much Democrats there is for one Republican in the universities of Stanford and Berkeley to indicate how much national politics is