About the Writer: A Brief Overview

Although I was born and raised in Ontario, Canada, I have grown up amongst the Trinidadian culture. My parents decided to move from their home country, Trinidad, in the early 1990s, but they did not leave their culture behind. Besides maintaining their dialect, my parents continued to cook their authentic food, which I grew up eating. To this day, I mainly indulge in Trinidadian food, occasionally straying away to eat something different. But I always come back to what I know – my cultural food from Trinidad. 

Aristotle’s concept of ethos, which emphasizes the credibility of the speaker, encompasses various requirements like conducting ethical research and properly citing sources, professional communication design, and using credible and well-established people to support the idea, just to name a few. While crafting my article, I carefully applied these principles, choosing sources that contain meaningful facts that back up my idea, including images to my article which portray homemade cultural food, and conducting a brief interview with Cherry Cordova – a woman born in Trinidad who migrated to Canada in the early 1900s. Her unique perspective was an essential part of employing ethos in my article because of her marital relation to a white male. Her inclusion offers a firsthand perspective on the importance of Toronto hosting more Trinidadian food festivals in Toronto, as her interview directly addresses the idea of preserving identity. 

While my sources contained facts pertinent to the idea of maintaining identity, these informants were unfortunately tainted with the rhetorical fallacy, Guilty by Association. This fallacy entails conclusions to be made based on irrelevant evidence to deliver an idea. Although Dwaine Plaza’s article contained relevant ideas for the maintenance of identity after migrating, he considered those migrating out of Trinidadian all to have the same values; in fact, not all Trinidadians preserve their identity or associate themselves with Trinidad. His take on the Trinidadian diaspora could have been better argued had he considered different perspectives.