Rhetorical Analysis Of Advice To Youth

In Mark Twain's piece, Advice to Youth, Twain attempts to to inform the youth on how to act by using humor rather than giving a informal lecture. He accomplishes this by playing fun at the methods most parents use to shape their kids and prepare them for later in life. He satirizes parent’s expectations versus how children actually act, even with guidance and wisdom. Through these strategies, the reader can observe sarcasm and irony, these of which are the two main supporting factors of Twain’s claims.

First, the author has an abundance of usage regarding a rather sarcastic undertone to some of his examples on how to act properly. He uses this sarcasm to really grab the targeted audience’s attention which is more-so the parents in this section of the text, “Go to bed early, get up early-this is wise. Some authorities say get up with the sun.. But a lark is really the best thing to get up with… you can easily train him …show more content…
By doing this, he can really loosen the tone of his purpose in the text, and bring the audience to a certain comfort level at which they would listen more efficiently. This can be seen like so, “Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any, also to strangers, and sometimes to others. If a person offends you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick.” In a general consensus, Twain is replicating the same impact he had with the first quote used which is what parents expect of their children versus what actually occurs. Clearly, a typical pair of parents would not condone children to run around hitting each other with bricks, but this may be the case occasionally. This may open some parent’s eyes as to what teaching methods are actually effective at accomplishing what they wish of their children, being Twain’s main purpose to this significant