My first formal letter was addressed to the President of Texas Tech University. It pertained to the issue of the lack of commuter parking on campus. I thought the president of the university was a good canidate for this letter because he would have a large amount of influence over the school's budget. My first argument was aimed at getting more commuter parking lots on campus for students. I stated many reasons for this needing to be done. In my opinion, with the growing population of Texas Tech students the current parking lots cannot accomidate everyone, forcing some people to find alternate and more time consuming ways of getting to class. I think my attempts to use logos in my argument were quite well placed. I used the reasoning that the growing number of students at Texas Tech would require more parking in the near future. It is already hard for the current commuter students to find a place to park, and with the 8,000 or so extra freshmen attending school this year, one can only imagine what parking will be like in the future when these students move off campus. .
My appeal to pathos was based mostly on my own personal experiences with parking on campus. The fact that some time I have to spend close to 15 minutes finding a spot or arrive at school 45 minutes early conveyed that point fairly well. I think I should have used other peoples complaints about the situation in order to prove that this is a community issue. Perhaps I could have taken a poll among the commuter students to further strengthen my argument.
I feel my appeal to Mr. Whitmore's character was my least effective argument. I should have gone to more lengths to prove to Mr. Whitmore that this was a problem that required him to deal with it. This would have been easily accomplished by pointed out that he was responsible for the entire student body at Texas Tech and that any school wide problem as large as this one could be easily tended to by someone with his authority.