Should College Athletes Be Paid Rhetorical Analysis

Authors such as Abdul-Jabbar, Swanson, Yankah all represent different viewpoints on the controversial topic whether or not college athletes should be paid. Despite each of the authors having polar opposite views on the topic, each author is similar by using rhetorical strategies to their advantage in trying to educate and persuade their audience. Through the use of appeal to ethics, personal experiences, and historical examples the authors share the common goal of convincing their audience whether or not college athletes should be paid. The first of the articles,written against college athletes getting paid, is titled, “Why NCAA Athletes Shouldn’t Be Paid”. The article was published in The New Yorker on October 14, 2015. The author is
The author of several books, he uses his writing skill to start his article off with a tremendous emotional hook. He describes child boxing matches in Thailand, where 9 and 10 year old children fight until one knocks the other out or renders them unable to continue-all the while as parents and other spectators bet on the outcome. He then compares child boxing matches in Thailand with last year’s NCAA basketball tournament. While not as brutal, the economics of the tournament are staggering. The NCAA earned $ 900 million, while another $ 9.2 billion were gambled on the tournament. He then drives home the point that, just like the Thai child boxers, no player participating in the NCAA basketball tournament received a dime from the
When the reader has first read the title of the article and so begins reading and is soon surprised at a number of things said in the first paragraphs. Yankah lists a number of things that he considers to be unfair - most of which deal with the exploitation of athletes. Several paragraphs into the article, he finally makes his point: that the push to pay college athletes is almost insulting in that it both fails to recognize the role of the athletic participation as part of the total college experience and seems to ignore the reality that it is only a very small fraction of the athletes will ever actually make it to the professional level. (The NCAA has run commercials recently that say, “There are almost 400,000 college athletes and practically all of them are going pro in something other than