Rhetorical Critique Of Bird By Bird

This is Rhetorical Critique on an excerpt of the book “Bird by Bird” written by Anne Lamott. The story has the broad topic of the first draft. Lamott decides to approach the topic and says why first drafts are important. Lamott expresses her affinity to the topic by explaining her past experience and attributes to them by explaining her process. Many people don’t like to write first drafts but after reading the story they at least will understand the importance of them. This leads to Lammot’s approach in the story to prove her claims. In “Bird by Bird” published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group in 1994, Anne Lamott explains the importance of a first draft. The author starts writing about how writers need to write first drafts of their …show more content…
This shows that Lamott is determined to put her point in the opening sentence. Throughout that same paragraph, Lamott says that the majority of good writers write the first draft to help themselves. In this claim, she uses pathos to try to relate to the reader by saying the thought that everyone has had at one point. That very successful writers can just sit down and write without completing the first draft. Lamott takes this and proves it wrong by saying that she knows plenty of successful writers who have really bad first drafts. Lamott continues to express the importance of first drafts by stating that many writers use them to start the writing process and help with their writer’s block. She calls the first draft a “child draft” because “you let it pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and then that you can shape it later” (Lamott). Meaning that in the first draft the author can write whatever comes to their mind because it is just a draft that has beginning …show more content…
Since the audience of this piece is a general audience, it has to assume certain things. If this story is given to college students to read and analyze then the assumption would be accepted, but excerpts of this story could be easily given to students who are writing their first essays to show the importance of first drafts. Throughout the story, Lamott writes about her process of how she writes the first draft. An example of her process is “So I’d start writing without reining myself in. It was almost just typing, just making my fingers move. And the writing would be terrible” (Lamott). This quote could be shown to people to demonstrate that the first draft is not the best piece of writing and some ways for people to start their own