Javier Robles wrote a powerful narrative on his experiences with the IEP program and how it shaped his academic career. This interested me because of the way he described being in kindergarten battling with his emotions from being taken out of class to practice his speech. For him this felt more intimidating than anything as a young boy. He then uses the rhetorical strategy of ethos to express how he had always been very timid and had trouble expressing himself in a situation that felt overwhelming. He also uses this rhetorical way of communicating by quoting his past self in instances where he would internally express the feelings of “well here we go again” when entering his anxiety inducing speech class.   

           Ethos; the rhetorical strategy is a highly effective strategy in that it connects deeper with the readers emotions and can tug on hearts for greater understanding. This is based on the writer’s credibility to the reader and to prove credibility, examples are given. By acknowledging both sides of the topic of interest, this gives a fair view of the topic and can couple with the writer’s view by providing polar examples to elevate the understanding of the writer’s point of view. The ability to connect with a topic by sharing a story that aligns with the readers’ possible experiences is strongly effective in conveying a message and Javier did just that with his rhetorical narrative of his experiences with the IEP program and how it shaped his academic career. 

        In this rhetorical narrative, Javier was trying to convey the fact that feeling out of place and weak can be very temporary and can soon turn into something gratifying. He expressed his feelings of happiness when he expressed himself seeing how far he has come in his academic career seeing that he is now in college and even studying speech and how it affects our society. The purpose of this speech was to evoke hope for his intended audience and provide them with his experiences as a youth so the intended audience could relate and know that there is someone like them who has achieved greatness and continues to shine.

        The intended audience in this speech is people who may have had emotionally challenging and trivial times throughout their academic career due to being put in learning programs such as the IEP and ESL classes. Javier appealed to the audience by expressing his motivation to demonstrate that not every student received the same educational background, and he was one of the many students struggling with feeling inadequate from a young age. These emotions being produced by a young child can be very molding and in order to break free from this view, realizing that you are not your struggle is important and is also what Javier expressed when he said that everyone, including us, is an outcast. He also pointed out that when we reach a point in our coming of age where ignorance is looked at as incompetent, we can get to the point of feeling unworthy. When Javier rhetorically expresses the question “what happens when you don’t understand or even struggle expressing those understandings?”, this thought process seems to have affected his way of communicating today. Javier broke down what it felt like to be a child who felt out of place for the majority of his adolescence and has used this as fuel to obtain more knowledge. Today he is studying how speech affects our society, and this is what ethos is all about, and we as a society must note that everyone words have meaning.