Cheryl Pidono
Professor Robert Oventile
English 1A
25 September 2014

Milton’s appeal to Pathos, Logos, and Ethos
Areopagitica and Of Education, written by English poet John Milton in 1664, is a prose, non-fictional book concerning the protest of people in England regarding the licensing policy. During the English Civil War Era, the period where this book was written, the British Parliament established the licensing and censorship policy to prevent any corruption of the minds to the people of England. Milton, on the contrary, disagrees with these policies addressing them as a form of violation toward the freedom of speech. Because of these policies, Milton and many others writers felt the difficulties in expressing their ideas because …show more content…

He once again emphasizes that every writer has the rights to write whatever they want. When someone writes a book, it is considered as a collection of his or her lifetime adventure and nobody could judge whether it can be published or not. Not everyone writes a book, not everyone writes a diary, but I am sure everyone remembers every lesson and virtue that they have learnt every single day, and will carry it through their life forever. They will also sometimes reminisce on it, and feel great about how far they’ve come. So it’s immensely unfair to judge on someone’s writings and consider them detrimental to the public. He also argues about the uncertain qualities of the licenser. How can one know if he or she is qualified enough to judge a piece of work? At the end of the day, all the Parliaments, Governments, or licensers are all humans; they’re not a computerized book examiner. They read through the books, they judge, they make comments, they choose whether they like it or not. Nobody’s perfect, its human nature to judge and to have different opinions one to another. So what if what they read is not into their liking? Is it considered unacceptable if they don’t like what they see? We are all born unique; just like books, they’re all written unique. Milton states that a licenser should be an individual who is “above the common measure, (and) […] no mistakes of what is passable or not” (28). Again, nobody’s