The exigence for Reilly’s piece is that he tried to do some research about Paterno, but a professor called him what he was doing and thinking was wrong. He pointed out that Paterno did some horrible things, but he did not realize. The audience of this article should be those people who suffered injury from Paterno in Penn State and those sports fans who watch Paterno. The whole article is very impressive by those “what a ___ I was.” sentences. The words fool, idiot, stooge, sap, chump and tools here all conveys a very similar kind of negative meanings: “I was stupid and easy to be deceived.” As the truth came out, Reilly realized that the professor was right and what he thought about Paterno was wrong. He used these repeated sentences to highlight
