"Friday Night at Iowa 80"

Rick Zollo, author of “Friday Night At Iowa 80,” is an ethnographic researcher that wrote an essay about a large truck stop. But not just any truck stop, it is said to be advertised as “the largest Amoco truck stop in the world.” It is located about ten miles from downtown Davenport. This essay provides an exceptional use of rhetoric in my opinion. In almost every section/paragraph be provides all three appeals simultaneously.

            To begin, there were plenty of passages that provided great examples of logos. Logos is there to stimulate your reader’s brain, and includes information, specific details, and facts. A certain instance where Rick provides logos is when he is in the truck stop restaurant, and states, “after a short wait, I was led to a small table in the back section, where at an adjacent booth, a young waitress was serving supper to a grizzled veteran. I detected a mild flirtation passing between them.” One part that really caught my eye is when Rick says that the witnesses the grizzled veteran and that he witnessed flirting going on, which provided exquisite detail. His effectiveness made it seem as if I was sitting in that same restaurant the same time they were.

            Pathos appeals to emotion. Pathos helps connect the reader to the reading material, and I believe that Rick Zollo thought long and hard how he would do this, however he did a great job. He connected to the reader by adding a sort of suspense. “The driver’s name was Morris, and he wasn’t sure he wanted t talk to me.” This shows how a trucker was very adamant about answering any questions that Rick asked. I believe that this added suspense because you didn’t know what was going to happen next. This trucker could have done anything. Rick goes on to say that throughout the conversation, he never gives his name, and is just as adamant through the whole conversation.

            Finally, we have ethos, which is your credibility as a speaker. Mr. Zollo does an incredibly great job at finding experienced people for his research, which builds credibility. Everyone that he speaks to is either an experienced truck driver or is an employee of the truck stop. One truck driver he speaks to has twenty-two years of experience, “Gordy was a veteran, with 22 years of service on the road.”  Another reason his credibility is quite good is because he didn’t just show up at a random truck stop and started asking questions, but instead he talked to the owner of Iowa 80 and received permission to hang around and interview people.

            In conclusion, with regards to the triangle of rhetoric, I believe that Rick Zollo put forth an incredible amount of work and knowledge into this research to almost perfect this triangle of rhetoric. Obviously his credibility is legitimate because he had talked to a wide range of people, he also showed great amounts of details to his research, and finally he added a little suspense to the mix to connect the essay to his readers.