The op-ed piece from the New York Times, “Tear Down Deadbeat Dams” by Yvon Chouinard, and the Outsiders magazine article “Blow Up” by Bruce Barcott both argue that the construction of dams has been extremely harmful to the natural world. Even though they are similar in idea and argument, the ways they communicate their message differ. I will analyze: FINISH
“Blow Up” is structured very much like a story in that Barcott gives the reader a sequence of events; we dammed and we dammed and we dammed but then one day we looked up then we looked down, and that was when we stopped seeing dams as instruments of holy progress. This timelined structure emphasizes Barcott’s point; it dramatizes the events and makes the reader understand the immensity of the dams as well as the immensity of the damage. It shows a clear cause and effect: the dams were the cause and depreciation is the effect.
Barcott’s use of ‘we’ adds to story-like feel since he’s using a first person pronoun. It instills a feeling of shared responsibility in the reader; we created this mess and we have to fix it. Chouinard does the same thing when he says, “New dams are a bad idea. We’ve glorified them for decades, but our pride in these engineering marvels has often blinded us…” He uses “us” and …show more content…
Therefore, they establish credibility in different ways. Since Chouinard’s article is from the New York Times, his readers would be more educated, so he cites the evidence he uses and provides numbers to back his claims. Barcott’s article is from Outsiders magazine. His audience consists of people that are experiencing the effects of dams on rivers firsthand; people that can’t partake in their preferred recreational activities, or who can imagine not being able to, because the organic existence of these rivers has been injured. Because of this, Barcott uses dramatic figurative language and a story-like structure to appeal to his audience
“Blow Up” is structured very much like a story in that Barcott gives the reader a sequence of events; we dammed and we dammed and we dammed but then one day we looked up then we looked down, and that was when we stopped seeing dams as instruments of holy progress. This timelined structure emphasizes Barcott’s point; it dramatizes the events and makes the reader understand the immensity of the dams as well as the immensity of the damage. It shows a clear cause and effect: the dams were the cause and depreciation is the effect.
Barcott’s use of ‘we’ adds to story-like feel since he’s using a first person pronoun. It instills a feeling of shared responsibility in the reader; we created this mess and we have to fix it. Chouinard does the same thing when he says, “New dams are a bad idea. We’ve glorified them for decades, but our pride in these engineering marvels has often blinded us…” He uses “us” and …show more content…
Therefore, they establish credibility in different ways. Since Chouinard’s article is from the New York Times, his readers would be more educated, so he cites the evidence he uses and provides numbers to back his claims. Barcott’s article is from Outsiders magazine. His audience consists of people that are experiencing the effects of dams on rivers firsthand; people that can’t partake in their preferred recreational activities, or who can imagine not being able to, because the organic existence of these rivers has been injured. Because of this, Barcott uses dramatic figurative language and a story-like structure to appeal to his audience