Chelsea Manzanares

ENGL 1010
Professor Justin Jory
12 July 2016
Rhetorical Analysis
Mike Rose and Matthew B. Crawfords pieces both focus on challenging the stigma on
industrial work. Society tends to place a stereotype of insignificance and mindlessness on these
types of workers, which both authors effectively are able to refute. Although the subject of both
articles are similar, the use of certain rhetorical tactics in both pieces vary greatly. In BlueCollar Brilliance, Rose engaged his audience with a more personal approach with his diction
and use of imagery. Crawford, however, chose to employ the use of claims of fact and evidence
to support his claims in Shop Class as a Soulcraft.
Mike Roses Blue Collar Brilliance, exhibits a heavier personal tone and diction to
appeal to his readers. Roses main intent with this piece was to educate his audience on the
untold intelligence and skill blue collar workers are not always known for. He elected to
incorporate a great amount of imagery, which invokes a sense of presence through the five sense
in his work. He also added story telling which served as supportive examples of his argument.
The addition of his mother, the expert waitress, and uncle, the strong skilled foreman, creates a
more intimate connection with the storyline. His use of imagery is remarkable, as he paints the
memory of his mother so vividly in her work. Rosie took customers orders, pencil poised over
pad, while fielding questions about the food. She walked full tilt through the room with plates
stretching up her left arm and two cups of coffee somehow cradled in her right hand (Rose,
2009). His tone radiates a sense of awe as he walks through Rosies waitressing expertise. His

choice of words creates a sense of professionalism and hard earned skill which is not commonly
associated in food work. Rose describes his mothers day to day actions with a tone that
encourages his readers to look past what a hungry customer may see. This allows the reader to
open up to the brunt of his argument later in the text.
In contrast, Shop Class as Soulcraft utilizes a different series of rhetorical tools to
instead persuade and educate its readers. The claims of fact strategy tries to convince the
audience that something is true or untrue. This was certainly one of Crawfords strongest
approaches, as it appears frequently throughout his text. His main argument centers around the
idea that vocational skill/work should be encouraged over a collegiate career.
Although in this day and age, society highly encourages a pathway to education,
Crawford brings many examples of why blue collar work should not be completely overlooked.
Through out the text, he challenges the way his reader may think of craftsman, mechanics,
engineers and electricians by providing evidence of an undisclosed intelligence and art in their
tough occupations. His use of diction and tone is very professional, and persuasive as he
continually uses claims of fact as his main tactic. The use of research and empirical evidence
by other authors and researchers in the same field strengthen and encourage this claim of fact.
Writers who use this type of evidence fundamentally appeal to reason and logic. In one
section, Crawford includes an incredible excerpt from an article written by two cognitive
scientists Mike Eisenberg and Ann Nishioka Eisenberg:
In our early work with HyperGami, we often ran into situations in which the program
provided us with a folding net that was mathematically correct i.e., a technically
correct unfolding of the desired solid but otherwise disastrous. Figure 7 shows an
example. Here, we are trying to create an approximation to a cone a pyramid on a
regular octagonal base. HyperGami provides us with a folding net that will, indeed,
produce a pyramid; but typically, no paper crafter would come up with a net of this sort,
since it is fiendishly hard to join together those eight tall triangles into a single vertex. In
fact, this is an illustrative example of a more general idea the difficulty of formalizing,

in purely mathematical terms, what it means to produce a realistic (and not merely
technically correct) solution to an algorithmic problem derived from human practice.
This study is just an example of how craftwork can aid in an individuals overall success in other
unrelated areas. He used a strong experiment as an example to bring forth a point that may be
weakened with little understanding a reader may have prior to coming across this article.
Crawford incorporates many more outside sources in his text that give this sort of background
and support for all of his claims. These sources aid in his credibility, as Crawford emphasizes
the need for a better understanding in all types of industrial work
The use of outside sources was definitely one of the smartest approaches noted in Shop
Class as Soulcraft, as it does not only add validity, but also doubles a strategy to better reach his
readers. His overall focus is centered on a scholastic audience. Many of whom are in college or
are planning a career field that requires traditional higher education. This article seeks to build
that connection with its reader by incorporating a style of writing that is seen in many scholarly
and academic journals.
While similar in topic, each author certainly tailored their writing strategies to better
reach their targeted audiences. Roses personal touches really created the connections he was
striving for in connected with the average American reader. Crawford, on the other hand,
provided many credible outside source to persuade a more academic audience. And although
each piece displayed different rhetorical tactics throughout the text, the articles both do a great
job individually delivering its main argument. Industrial work is something that should not be
dismissed as mindless. Instead lies an entire field of sharpened expertise and intelligence that can
be incredibly fulfilling to the dedicated worker.

References

Crawford, Matthew B. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New
York: Penguin, 2009. Print.
Jory, Justin. Rhetorical Strategies, Defined. Week 4 Module: Thursday July 7th. English
1010.
Rose, Mike. Blue-Collar Brilliance. American Scholar. 2009.