Rhetorical Analysis Of Georgia Pope's 'The First Steps Of Prevention'

In Georgia Pope 's "The First Steps of Prevention", she discusses suicide and the steps that can be taken to help lower the amount of suicides amongst young adults. “Suicide for decades has held the third leading cause of death among young adults” (Pope 1). She takes her stance on suicide very early on, suggesting colleges and universities should make a better effort at noticing the signs of suicide and helping to prevent it. “The stability of American university and college students’ mental health should be taken just as serious as the threat of suicide” (Pope 1). For decades it has been the third leading cause of death in young adults and it is time to take action. According to Pope, the stability of the mental health of college students should be just as important as the threat of suicide and she provides heavy use of tone, stream of consciousness and other literary devices to support her argument. The strongest literary device Pope used in this work is tone. Tone is befitting of a …show more content…
Pope combined several literary devices to push her argument. She uses tone to grip the reader while also gaining the sympathy of the reader. She uses stream of consciousness to give the paper more life and make it feel less animated and more intriguing. She then uses amplification to push her argument further and provide more depth for the reader. Pope provides statistics and other facts to make her argument less bias, more realistic and more convincing—all while pushing her own agenda. She often intertwines these to propel her argument even more. Pope execution of using these literary devices and intertwining them make for a near perfect argument. Her use of several different literary devices allowed her to make a passionate and gripping argument while also pushing an agenda and educating the reader. Pope had an agenda, set out to fulfill it and did a great