Carol Sacks Rhetoric Conversations

This work is formal and neutral, as shown in the passage, “When I was a medical student many years ago, one of the nurses called me in considerable perplexity, and gave me this singular story on the phone: that they had a new patient—a young man—just admitted that morning. He had seemed very nice, very normal, all day—indeed, until a few minutes before, when he awoke from a snooze. He then seemed excited and strange—not himself in the least. He had somehow contrived to fall out of bed, and was not sitting on the floor, carrying on and vociferating, and refusing to go back to bed. Could I come, please, and sort out what was happening?”(Sacks 55) His diction indicates education and a classical training in English, using proper grammar and an …show more content…
Throughout the book he continually uses rhetorical questions to illustrate what he was thinking at the time he made each observation, with periodic sentences that tended towards variety in length. The rhythm was broken by the long references to previous works, other authors, and speakers who have looked at similar cases, causing the reader to bounce back and forth between writing and references, the asterisks, extra points put to the side, etc. His use of direct conversation gives him credibility, not only does he know neurology like the back of his hand, he wants you to know …show more content…
I was confounded, for Tourette’s syndrome was said to be excessively rare. It had an incidence, I had read, of one in a million, yet I had apparently seen three examples in an hour. I was thrown into a turmoil of bewilderment and wonder: was it possible that I had been over-looking this all the time, either not seeing such patients or vaguely dismissing them as ‘nervous’, ‘cracked’, ‘twitchy’? Was it possible that everyone had been overlooking them? What is possible that Tourette’s was not a rarity, but rather a common—a thousand times more common, say, than previously supposed? The next day without specially looking, I saw another two in the street. At this point I conceived a whimsical fantasy or private joke: suppose (I said to myself) that Tourette’s is very common but fails to be recognized but once recognized is easily and constantly seen. Suppose one such Touretter recognizes another, and these two a third, and these three a fourth, until, by incrementing recognition, a whole band of them is found: brothers and sisters in pathology, a new species in our midst, joined together by mutual recognition and concern? Could there not come together, by such spontaneous aggregation, a whole association of New Yorkers with Tourette’s?”(Sacks 94) The effect created is almost comical, supposing to himself that there could be a secret society of people with Tourette’s