Rhetorical Analysis Second Draft

Brandon Castaneda
English 1010- Nkenna Onwuzuruoha
December 9, 2016
Rhetorical Analysis
Books Make You a Boring Person, is an article written by Cristina Nehring. It was
published on the New York Times website on June 27th of 2004. Cristina is an award-winning
essayist, writer, memoirist, and poet. She has an opinionated and provocative writing style; her
first book is called A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century.
She has written for many different sources, including; The New York Times, The Los Angeles
times, and many others. She writes about a wide range of subjects including love, dating,
drinking, and even certain health disorders. She has a daughter named Eurydice, who was
diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia and Down Syndrome as a newborn. Cristina and her
daughter currently live in Paris, France. Based off this essay, her intended audience is
opinionated book snobs who seemingly worship the written word, but dont form their own
opinions about what they read. It seems that during the time of this essay being published, there
was a gradual uprising of self-important book lovers. She wants this group of people to form
their own opinions, she tries to achieve this by seemingly shaming them for how they read. This
essay was well received at the time, and has been a subject for debate ever since.
The number of books and book consumers is always increasing. With these people and
the growing book collection, there is an important problem that is raising at a similar rate. The
problem of overloading our brains by jamming too much information into them. This affects
some people more than others, and you dont have to look too hard to find an example of this.
There are times when someone might ask their book loving friend about something they just
read. And that person might not have a great answer because they did not absorb much from that
reading experience. A way of fixing this problem could be; dont hold books in a higher esteem
than our own experiences and life lessons. This is the view of many great authors. People such
as; Mark Moskowitz, Michel de Montaigne, and even Ralph Waldo Emerson. All things in
moderation is a great little quote that applies to this situation, as well as millions of other
situations.
Cristina attacks these snobs in a way that makes them seem like uneducated sheep, but
doesnt give her own way to stop this from happening.
In Books Make You a Boring Person, Cristina does a great job at defining the problem
and who is involved in it. She also relies a little bit heavily on the opinions and experiences of
others to prove her point. This doesnt hurt her overall writing but it does decrease her credibility
a little. However, this essay was very well thought out. Throughout her writing, she uses context
and experience to give the reader an idea on how she feels about this issue. Cristina tries to be
convincing to the audience using her word choice and sentence structure. But overall, her way of
writing is refreshingly simple, while having an important message behind it.

Cristina uses real-life examples to support her claim that generalizes how books are
received. A specific reference to a claim made about this subject is in the second paragraph. She
says, Books keep kids off drugs. They keep gang members out of prison. They keep terrorists,
for all we know, at the gates. These are all examples for logos that show how people believe
books are tools for changing others perspectives. They are all effective in proving Nehrings
point. She also says that it isnt about the content of books, it is about peoples fetishization
with books, and how they live with it. At the end, she talks about how we could combat these
issues with moderation. Which is something that is proven to work with most things. These
examples are all created by others, not by her alone.
She uses the logic of others quite heavily to help give substance to the claims that she is
making. Such as, when Mark Moskowitz and Ralph Waldo Emerson are quoted about similar
issues they dealt with. Another way that she uses ethos is when she talks about how we viewed
books in the past. That they were more for entertainment than they were for educational
purposes. Also, most of how she claims we can fix these issues are things that have been learned
from the trails and errors of others. She seemingly gives her own experience on this issue in the
first paragraph, in a small example situation that she could have been in.
She uses an undercurrent of aggression and shaming throughout her essay, which results
in her basically attacking this group of people. This is a way of writing that challenges people to
form their own opinions, which is what these people dont generally do. Her way of using pathos
results in her not talking specifically about emotions, but rather how these people can evoke
emotions. The first paragraph gives the reader a general idea about how she personally feels
about this subject. She says a few paragraphs after, that it is breathtaking that people who
worship books most of the time dont have anything intelligent to say about what they read. This
can evoke a feeling of shame for someone apart of her intended audience. She then includes a
quote from William Hazlitt about how asking someone to give up a book is like asking a
paralytic to jump up and walk. Which gives the reader some insight about how the book lovers
might feel. And in the second to last paragraph, Cristina says that books can create unrealistic
feelings easier than real feelings. This shows emotion more as an object instead of something
that one might feel. But throughout the story, you might be able to read between the lines and see
some aggression with how she writes.
Cristina is very organized with her thoughts and the flow of her narrative. It would be
hard not to understand the idea behind this. She uses language that isnt difficult to understand
and learn. The tone, to me, seems more accusatory and aggressive. But that can be
understandable with an issue that could become more problematic as time and media progress.
However, she points a lot of fingers and doesnt give much help in fixing the problem. In the
end, I had a good time reading this passage, and it certainly made me aware of the dangers of too
much knowledge.

Final Word Count: 1085