Megan Lynch, September 30, 2016

Today in class Mr. Rivers was absent, however Ms. Dalia was there to give us practice with what we have been learning. Lately we have been going over literary and rhetorical devices or readings. We have learned that literary normally goes along with a story, and rhetorical is intended to persuade someone to something. Today to help us understand these devices we read a primary source document from the 1700s. This document was titled, "Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God" by Jonathan Edwards. This was a religious reading, it was written during a time where religion played a prominent part in everyone's life, and at the time people didn't always think for themselves. In the 18th century not a lot of people were educated, and were not really courageous enough to have their own thoughts, and speak up if something like this reading was all they knew. Edwards used his writing to create fear in his audience. We discussed in class how there was no logos, which is a rhetorical device, in this type of writing. He was biased however, he did go to Yale University for religious education, which gave the document ethos. We even found that there was religious allusions in this document. Not to be confused with "illusion", that means he further provided credibility to what he was saying by quoting the bible. An example of that wold be, “All that we can possibly say about it, gives but a very feeble, faint representation of it; it is inexpressible and inconceivable: For ‘who knows the power of God’s anger?’ “ from Psalm 90. There was also plenty of literary devices that we found in this document. For instance this piece of imagery, "We find it easy to tread on and crush a worm that we see crawling on the earth". After reading the whole document and scouting out devices we answered 5 out of the 8 questions on the last page of the pdf to practice without the help of a teacher identifying devices and how they are used in writing to create emotion with the audience. 

Example of the fear Edwards created to make people at the time always have god on mind.