In his passionate narrative on the equal humanity of African-American slaves, Frederick Douglass illustrates the soul-killing effect in which destroys the minds of this race and their prerequisite for education. He explicitly conveys this idea in paragraphs seven and eight from “Learning to Read and Write” through the use of pathos, diction, and anecdotes. Douglass displays vehement emotions in this excerpt in order to exhibit the significance of education (reading and writing). He uses pathos to directly show why the ability to read is a right especially necessary for slaves. His hidden purpose in this essay is to portray that African-American slaves are mortal, are intelligent, and deserve the right to knowledge as well as any other human beings in this world. He proposes that slaveholders during this time “shut them in the dark” as they are given limited if not no opportunities to “experience the world”. He uses fervent emotion in his tone and…show more content… The author narrates in great detail how he attained his goal and the struggles in which he encountered to do so. He includes several personal stories throughout the essay that explicitly depict and fortify his purpose. “When left thus, I used to spend the time in writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copy-book, copying what he had written.” This “tedious” process, in which took him countless years, effectively illustrating the intensity of learning a simple task for a slave at this time. In these two paragraphs, he recounts his idea of escaping and how it ventured into his mind. This scheme, in which would require assiduous effort, is evidently displayed to the reader the loathsome circumstances in which the author underwent. His personal examples and anecdotes used in these paragraphs gives cogent proof for his
