Nicole McGahey- October 4, 2016

Today in class, we mainly focused on two things: evaluating how a text accomplishes its purpose, and adding specificity to our writing.

We got into our groups from yesterday, and continued to talk about the “Sinners of an Angry God” speech that we’ve been looking at since Friday.

First, we were given two questions to answer about the text:

1.What does this text do?

2. How does this text do it?

Basically, we had to explain what the purpose of the text is, and how the text accomplishes that purpose. This is called rhetorical analysis. So, for “Sinners of an Angry God,” the purpose of the speech was to urge people to obey God, or else he will punish them. The author persuades his audience by using a lot of pathos to frighten them, and very little logos.

After we discussed it, each group was given a dry-erase marker to construct a well-written thesis statement that answered the two questions above. These were the 3 thesis statements that our class wrote on the board:

1. John Edwards successfully instills fear into his audience by the use of his powerful and disturbing illustrations of hell, strong verbs, and a distressful message of God’s wrath.

2. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” strikes fear into the heart of the audience by the use of his threatening and ominous words.

3. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” drills fear into the audience by using pathos through intense imagery and metaphors.

As we read over the sentences that were written on the board, we underlined the verbs that were used in each one. Mr. Rivers emphasized the importance of using strong verbs in thesis statements. "Instills," "strikes," and "drills" are examples of strong verbs from the sentences above.

After that, we started to move on to our next objective, which was to modify our thesis statements and make them more specific by “interrogating” them. This means asking questions- who, what, when, where, why, and how- and adding in those details. In my group, we made our sentence more specific by changing it to this:

“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a sermon by the 18th century minister John Edwards, drills fear into the audience to stress the importance of obedience to God and prevent people from committing sin, by using pathos through intense imagery and metaphors.

As you can see, this thesis statement is more specific because it includes the details such as who wrote it, when and why he wrote it, and how he persuades his audience.

This quote demonstrates an example of imagery from the speech that provokes fear in the audience.