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Rhetorical Strategies

Blog#1: Rhetorical Strategies

Simile: “…the way the sky at sunset looked like a sheet of fire,”(21).

Personification: “’She already fought the fire once and won...’”(15).

Situational Irony: “’You don’t have to worry anymore, baby,’ Dad said. ‘You’re safe now’”(14). [Ironic because he had just kidnapped her from a hospital.]

Parallelism: “Other kids wanted to fight us because we had red hair, because dad was a drunk, because we wore rags and didn’t take baths, because we lived in a falling down house…because they’d go by our dark house at night and see we couldn’t afford electricity,”(165).

Rhetorical Questions: “All those years in Welch with no food, no coal, no plumbing and Mom had been sitting on land worth a million dollars? Could she have solved our financial problems by selling this land she never saw?”(273).


Rhetorical Strategies play a key role in the description and overall understanding of Jeannette Walls’ memoir. She uses techniques like parallelism and similes to draw attention to real imaginable circumstances that she faced growing up. She uses them to describe her conditions in a discrete polite way, instead of just ranting or complaining about her living situations. In addition, Walls uses rhetorical questions to illustrate her on confusion with her parents to the reader. Walls makes it evident that she does not understand her parents’ reason or purpose for their chaotic lifestyle more then anyone else. While she uses rhetorical questions to show her own confusion with her parents, Jeannette Walls uses situational irony to show flawed reasoning of her parents that she might have believed in younger years. Its because of this that most situational irony can be found in the beginning of the novel, when Jeannette Walls is younger and gullible; while most rhetorical questions are found towards the end of the novel. Overall Jeannette Walls uses rhetorical strategies to share complex or personal emotions about the circumstances of which she grew-up in.

5 comments:

  1. For me it was really hard to find any kind of rhetorical strategies in Jeannette's memoir. It was so dry in its use of them. However, I believe this works in the reader's advantage. Walls' lack of flowery diction gives the novel a more realistic feel because it is entirely true and is completely void of all the distracting imagery that usually comes with a book. She spells it out for her audience, because there was nothing flowery about her childhood, and delivers it as is. So while I agree that the scarce rhetorical strategies used in Walls' played a role, I don't think they are as major to the plot line as these methods usually are. There is not much to be read between the lines, her childhood was straightforward and tragic, why would her delivery be any different?

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  2. in the quote you used as rhetorical questions it also has tricolon

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  3. What are the most used rhetorical stratepgies (DIDLS) used in the section "The Desert."

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