Rhetorical Analysis

When I think of the death penalty, I always think about how "an eye for an eye" is a horrible way to provide justice. But I never think about the officers who must carry out the death penalty in the states it is still legal. How do they feel? Are they cold, insensitive, unfeeling people? Are they able to live joyous and normal lives with friends and families? Being a person who doesn't believe in the death penalty, I worry for these people who are required to kill others. In Everything's an Argument, I found a particularly interesting article by Michael Osofsky called "The Psychological Experience of Security Officers Who Work with Executions". Through factual evidence, Osofsky provides his readers with an idea of what the officers must suffer through but his argument is lacking information regarding exactly what psychological changes and emotions the officers feel. With this hole in the article, his argument feels like a robotic regurgitation of information instead of the emotional roller coaster the article's title alludes to.

We'll begin the rhetorical analysis of Osofsky's article by establishing exactly who he is, where he stands and what his potential biases are. In a brief paragraph written, I assume, by one of the authors of Everything's an Argument, we learn Osofsky wrote his article while he was a junior at Stanford working under Philip Zimbardo (to the right is a picture of him). Wow. The second I read this, I was immediately impressed and ready to eat up whatever Osofsky said. I spent all four of my high school years taking psychology classes and learning about how important Zimbardo is to the field of psychology. Zimbardo was a psychologist back in the times when there weren't many restrictions on the kinds of psychological experiments that could be conducted. Back in 1971, he conducted the infamous Stanford Prison Study that put voluntary Stanford students through grueling experiments regarding how people act when split into an "us-and-them" setting. To learn more about this experiment, click on this link (for I have no time to explain it any further seeing as the experiment is not the focus of this blog post): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Zimbardo#The_prison_study. Anyways, providing this tidbit of information would make just about anyone who's ever dabbled in psychology want to believe Osofsky fully an completely. Yet name dropping may not convince readers Osofsky is convincing in this article.

To convince the part of his audience that he has not by dropping Zimbardo's name, Osofsky crams facts and figures down our throats. This is the part of his article I believe is missing the point. The title is "The Psychological Experience of Security Officers Who Work with Executions". So why spend well over half the article detailing the what was done and used to gather information, and how Americans feel about the death penalty now. Perhaps Osofsky was trying to drill into our minds how complex the idea of the death penalty is and how this fact would cause even greater suffering for the people who must carry it out. If that is the reasoning behind detailing polls about whether or not people support the death penalty, then Osofsky should have pointed that out. Instead, he seems to just drop that paragraph in there for no reason. Who cares about how America feels? This article is supposed to be about how the officers feel about their job requirements!

If Osofsky were to be put to the ultimate test of being graded by Dr. W, he would certainly fail. He completely ignores the pathos of his argument even though it is the most important part of his article. After reading his article, I have no clear idea the kinds of psychological experiences the officers go through. In the last few paragraphs, Osofsky does begin to explain that, no, the officers do not become less humane as I worried they would. Osofsky finally gives us the information we've been looking for all along. I didn't want to know all the tests they took and how long the interviews were. I wanted to know what information was gathered that related to their emotional adventure while having to carry out the death penalty. In this Osofsky fails. His argument is factual when it should be emotional.

Picture credits:
Celestiniosity.com (the death penalty)

https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Session_ID=0139d1171214fc100ae4b5c2b52c4f02&Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Product_Code=av175&Category_Code=CSCI (Philip Zimbardo)