Cody Mills
Professor Heather Trahan
15ENG101-041
Essay 2 – Rhetorical Analysis
October 19, 2009
Words with Force (Working Title)
Ever since we started our schooling, we’ve been constantly exposed to and bombarded with writing, whether it means having to compose our own pieces or being required to examine the work of another individual. We’re all aware that our writings have the power to convey a message, but there is an aspect of the work that we often overlook, or at least don’t consciously acknowledge. That is the ability of our words to induce change. The messages we embed within our words have to power to alter the way people see things, from the mundane to the profound. In the book Writing to Change the World by Mary Pipher, Pipher examines this message in the second chapter, “Writing to Connect”. She examines the incredible effect that some works of writers have done for people.
In the chapter, Pipher discusses the profound changes that some works have made on the world. One of the examples she uses is the well-known Diary of Anne Frank. She recalls to the reader that reading Anne Frank’s writings had the effect of making her more aware of the evils that could exist in the world, and she said, “I lost my spiritual innocence” (Pipher 201). She also tells us that she visited the Holocaust Museum in 2003. Pipher then goes on to list some more examples, including Super Size Me, a study of the effects of eating only fast food.
Pipher does a very good job of choosing her examples, using well-known sources to express her point clearly and also easily connect with the emotional side of her readers. I found it interesting that she chose the Diary of Anne Frank as one of her examples; this is a source that undoubtedly almost everyone has come across sometime in their lives, and talks about the Holocaust through the eyes of the teenage writer. It would certainly be easy to see how Anne Frank’s writings would be able to influence the way people looked at conditions in Nazi-occupied Europe, despite all the accounts they had all ready heard. This was a different perspective. It may be too much to assume she was writing it purely for us to see what she went through, though, considering that this was indeed a diary.