Sadek 1

Tracy Sadek
English 115 Honors
Professor Lawson
14 September 2016
Scaffolding Exercise: Rhetorical Analysis
Word Count: 659
Rhetorical Analysis on Finding My Eye-dentity
Undergraduate student and activist, Olivia Chung, in her essay, Finding My Eyedentity, enumerates how people in her life attempt to persuade her to change her physical
appearance to better fit into mainstream American culture. Chungs purpose is to convey that
people should embrace their culture and physical appearance, not alter it to feel like they belong.
Chung employs an unconventionally structured essay using pathos as her gateway to reach out to
her audience. Considering that she is an activist, the audience is able to trust her passion for the
subject, but this does not necessarily mean that she is an expert. She adopts a crestfallen tone to
emit similar feelings and experiences in her young adult readers.
Chung begins her essay on her Asian eyes by revealing that her mother is encouraging
her to get eyelid surgery to look more beautiful. She appeals to the dejected emotions of her
readers when her mother implies, You know, because they look kind of squinty and on top of
that you have an underbite, so you look really mean (Chung 150). Chung asserts this in her
essay in order to specify how her mother wants her to change her appearance to look more
appealing. This outpouring of emotion from Chung exhibits a disheartening tone to outline how
she feels unaccepted by her loved ones for her eyes. Her audience is able to relate to how she is
expressing herself because the media portrays many young adults, mainly women, a certain way,

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therefore, leading them to believe that a certain trend in physical appearance is beautiful.
Chung shifts to expressing her frustration by reminiscing about the first time she was
insulted when a child came up to her and said, Ching chong chinaman! (Chung 150). Chung
creates a subdued diction by putting certain words in italics. Almost all the text in italics is either
disheartening or insulting. This helps to pinpoint the pathos used in the essay so the audience is
able to relate to how Chung is feeling. Using personal events, Chung is able to reach out to her
audience to the extent where the audience may have had similar events occur in their lives as
well. America is a very diverse country filled with people of different ethnicities. Chung used
this past event as an advantage to appeal to her audience because many people have heard about
stereotypical insults of certain races.
The author closes her essay by expressing how, Asian eyes are beautiful. Your eyes are
beautiful. My eyes are beautiful. Asian is beautiful (Chung 151). She expresses her belief that
everyone is beautiful just the way they are. Chung advises her audience to not change their
physical appearance so they can feel like they are better fit in American Culture. Chung ends her
essay leaving the audience filled with sympathetic and heartfelt emotions. Chung portrays her
purpose, but she did not offer any sort of logos. She could have provided a statistic on the
amount of Asian girls who get eyelid surgery. If the statistic was overwhelmingly big, then it
could have made a big impact to persuade her audience. Chungs position could have been more
persuasive if she included some form of logos in her essay.
Ultimately, Chung expresses her feelings on changing someones physical appearance to
follow mainstream American trends in her essay. She focuses on using pathos to appeal to her
audience to have readers relate to her past experiences in life. Chung also emphasizes the use of
pathos by italicizing certain dismal diction. Although she appeals to the audiences emotions, she

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does not offer any form of statistics or other resources to persuade her audience. There is no sort
of logos in the essay which would have made the essay much more persuasive. Overall, Chungs
essay conveys the purpose she set to reach out to the young adults experiencing similar events as
she went through.

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Works Cited
Chung, Olivia. Finding My Eye-dentity. Pop Perspectives: Readings to Critique
Contemporary Culture. Ed. Laura Gray-Rosendale. San Francisco: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
149-151. Print