Draft 1.2 Final Draft of Rhetorical Analysis
“Healing Through the Written Word” by Karen Cangialosi
Psychotherapist Karen Cangialosi who works at the Kaiser Permanente’s Choice Wellness Center in San Diego uses writing as form a of therapy that challenges the definition of what therapy means. Cangialosi writes to make the audience feel that writing is an influential thing when it comes to healing. Writing can boost a person’s confidence. Cangialosi illuminates that writing is connected with making positive health results as she reaches to her audience primarily composed of readers of The Permanente Journal -- those who work in the medical field and their patients. This article might appeal to people suffering from emotional trauma, or who are looking for alternative medicine. In Karen Cangialosi’s article, “Healing through the Written Word,” that first appeared in The Permanente Journal, she invites us into the wellness center through her use of the first-person; in addition, she commendably uses an appeal to expert opinion, real-life examples as to create emotional appeals in order to persuade her audience to use the power of writing to heal.
Cangialosi is careful to draw from the work of a variety of experts so that she might make her case that writing has the power to heal. She even considers poets to be experts. In the beginning of her article, Cangialosi quotes EE Cummings, “To be nobody-but-yourself—-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight ….”(qtd. in Cangialosi 425) which discusses how difficult it can be to be an individual in a time when it’s so easy to be just like everyone else. Cangialosi uses this quote to briefly describe the problems that every individual will eventually face. She states this quote in such a way so that she is careful to not be too specific or exclude any person or group of people. She then moves to the expert opinion of a medical doctor. Cangialosi argues that writing about past stressful experiences is a useful way to relieve people’s pain like chronic illness and can reduce the symptoms of asthma or rheumatoid arthritis. Cangialosi cites MedServ Medical News and the study by Smyth and colleagues, who noted, ”The simple act of writing about bad times can be a potent, and low cost, method of relieving pain and symptoms of chronic illnesses ….” (qtd. in Cangialosi 425). She explains that writing can be a powerful tool for dealing with terrible events of the past which not only heals our pain and decreases the symptoms of chronic illness but also is an effective and handy mechanism. In addition, it is free of cost and requiring only a pen and a notebook. This persuades the audience to see how incidents of pain and the symptoms of chronic illnesses can be decreased by just writing which is something anyone can do. By sharing these facts, Cangialosi not only appears credible, but also appears relatable to read...
