1 Folts Derek Folts CLAR 110-06 Ms. Kara Manning September, 2, 2007 My Criticism of "A Fable for Tomorrow" Descriptive essays are one of the most influential essays someone can write. In an excerpt from the story "A Fable for Tomorrow" by Rachel Carlson, many examples of description are presented to the reader. Miss Carlson uses the three rhetorical elements throughout her essay to help present her point and use description. I feel she did a great job of incorporating logos, ethos, and pathos throughout. She gets a good blend of each of these elements and descriptive writing to make a very persuasive essay. When looking at this essay I see some good examples of pathos that Rachel Carlson uses. Her use of pathos does a great job connecting with the descriptions she uses. The first line of the essay, "There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings." was a great start to her description. (Carlson) This line plays to the emotions because in the very first sentence she's already making the town sound like this beautiful place in the United States. It's as if there's a perfectly parallel connection between the humans and nature. When she talks about it being in the heart of America she means a few things. One, she wants you to feel like it's a town that everyone knows or has heard of, that this place is well know and loved. Secondly I feel that she wants the readers to think this is a small town with anything you'd ever need in it and the people are good down to earth people when you read the bit about Heart of America. Then she goes directly to "where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings," so she's making you feel like this town is small and relies upon the earth for some of its materials. This makes me feel like I already like this
Folts 2 town and wish I lived there. And, I think she wants a lot of the readers to feel that way also. It's almost as if she kind of wants the reader to become attached to the town. The attachment to the town will make the reader more emotional once she gets to her real point to her book. The last part of that sentence also sticks out to me. Saying that the town is in harmony with its surroundings says to me that the plants and animals are a large part of this community too. Carlson uses many more lines that invoke emotions on you while using description. "A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know" is a line that really sticks out to me as using pathos. She starts out with a grim specter. This is to start just the slightest feeling of fear to set you up for the rest of the sentence. In the next part of the sentence she shows that many people did not even know that anything wrong was happening and everyone was completely ignorant of what was going on. But, then she goes on to make it a point to say that soon enough our bad habits will catch up with us and finally be just another part of our life. If I was living in the sixties and read this I would be scared. It doesn't affect me as much now because I've learned about it my whole life and it's been a problem for years. If there's one part in this essay that invokes an emotion it is this Carlson part. does a great job of making that come out if you ask me. I feel like Rachel Carlson feels that she does not need to show the readers why she knows what she's talking about. At the time many people knew who she was. She was a very well-known marine biologist and she took very strong stances against DDT and other pesticides. She had already written a widely acclaimed book that dealt with nature before called "The Sea around Us" and a couple other books too. So I would say that she felt she did not need to establish ethos as much due to her well known name already. I feel that it worked out fine for her because after reading the prelude to her essay I trusted her enough to believe what she was telling me was not lies or away from the truth. But, after reading
Folts 3 through the essay a few more times I started to realize that Miss Carlson also establishes ethos in me just by her style of writing. It's as if she's radiating knowledge of the subject as she writes about it. The very last line of the essay, "What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America? This book is an attempt to explain," really makes me feel as if she knows what she's talking about. (Carlson) I feel that she has studied this subject and the towns that it's actually happened to so much that she knows exactly what she's talking about and why. Just style she uses and the way she describes the town, it's like she's seen it many times before. Rachel Carlson adds logos into the whole story. That's the whole reason she wrote the essay was to provide the logos and open peoples eyes with it. By using description, she does just that. Carlson sets up the essay in such a way that helps readers understand what's going on and stuff makes the reader want to know more about what happened to this town. Her main goal to this opening essay is to get readers' attention and then make them want to read the rest of her story. She starts by telling how beautiful the town is and why everyone loved it. Then she goes into little things that start happening to the town and then the demise of this "heart of the United States" town. This organization of writing makes the reader want to read more about why this happens and how the town faired. And, at the very end of the story she decides to invoke fear into the reader (which I think is brilliant) to make the reader want to stop what's happening. Overall I feel Rachel Carlson did a great job with "A Fable for Tomorrow." She used description very well in all three rhetorical appeals. After reading this essay it makes me kind of think about my impact on the earth and how I should treat it. She also makes me think about where I am when you look at the planet as a whole. Now I feel that everything on earth works together to make it so great. Not just humans ruling over everything else. So she was very successful in using a descriptive essay to convince
Folts 4 me to change my ways. The description just ties the whole thing together. The most important part though is that she start her book a great way so that people stay interested and I think she did just that. Works Cited Carlson, Rachel. "A Fable for Tomorrow." The Seagull Readers: Essays. Ed. Joseph Kelly. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007.