Essay about rhetorical analysis

Submitted By dk197145
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Pages: 6
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In her piece, Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp, Joy Williams employs the use of such rhetorical devices as the Rhetorical Triangle (logos, pathos and ethos), in order to make her essay more effective in moving her audience to a state of praxis. It appears that ‘you’ are the target audience of the writing and Williams is speaking directly to you. Her goal is to show the reader how humans are destroying their world and to try to make them change their actions.

The first paragraph alone begins with a captivating sentence: “I don’t want to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately – that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much” (Williams 262). This opening puts the reader on the defensive, causing them to listen to what Williams has to say in order to dispute it and promote their own character. While this would lead to the belief that the writing is not centered on you, the paragraphs to follow are about what you do, how you do it, and why you like it.

The reader might think that everything is about you. “You support fiddling…“ (Williams 270). “You want proof, you insist on proof” (Williams 271). This is rhetorically effective because you must be the one to change in order to save the environment and if Williams can convince you to live more environmentally friendly, then she has accomplished something. The logos (logic) behind changing you is that maybe one day you will help influence other people to live the same way.

Even seeking feeling in the reader (pathos), Williams asks the reader to search their soul. “You don’t even take pleasure in looking at nature photographs these days. Oh, they can be just as pretty as always, but don’t they make you feel increasingly… anxious? Filled with more trepidation than peace? So what’s the point?” (Williams 262). She then leads into why the nature pictures leave you feeling sad and about how the pictures have been cropped to take out the buildings and human structures in the background. The truth behind the pictures play on the emotional heart strings of humans. They make one feel a sense of regret for what was done and a responsibility to right the wrong.

Having done some cursory research on Joy Williams, it was found that she is a known author in the Florida Keys and attended the 1996 Annual Key West Literary Seminar on American Writers and the Natural World. In Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp, she talks about how developers “just started a ten-thousand-acre city in the Everglades” (Williams 267), tearing down this irreplaceable land, bits and pieces at a time. Knowing that she has lived in Florida reassures her ethos (authority) since she may have been witness to the actual damage of this vast wetland.

Irony is another significant rhetorical device that Williams uses. “When the U.S. Army notified Winston Churchill that the first atomic bomb had been detonated in New Mexico, it chose the code phrase babies satisfactorily born” (Williams 263). The idea of such a destructive and deadly device being given a seemingly harmless name is just one examples of irony, where Williams is actually telling the reader that this is in fact irony and that they have been leading a double life ever since this occurrence.

Sarcasm can be a powerful tool in both speech and writing. Williams incorporates this tool into her writing in some subtle and yet direct ways. “You seem to have liked your dinoseb. It’s been a popular weed killer, even though it has been directly linked with birth defects. You must hate weeds a lot” (Williams 264). How inhumane does she think people are these days? Of course we value our children and their health more than that of killing weeds, but yet in reality she is right because we are the basis of our own health problems. She provides a very realistic example of how people are harming their children everyday.

Some authors use metaphor in the
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