Stuff Is Not Salvation Anna Quindlen

In the world of journalism, journalists must simultaneously entertain and convince their audience in order to stay relevant. To entertain, journalists must have a highly biased or controversial viewpoints on several subjects, and to appear credible, they must communicate with rhetorical strategies. For example, in 2008, the Great Recession damaged many Americans, which gives Anna Quindlen the right timing to write an essay with proper rhetorical strategies. In Anna Quindlen’s “Stuff Is Not Salvation”, she criticizes American spending behavior through exemplifying, analyzing cause and effect, and comparing and contrasting. To criticize America’s spending behavior, Anna Quindlen provides brief examples throughout her essay. By exemplifying, Anna Quindlen narrows down her arguments to concrete cases explaining what she specifically meant by their spending addiction. For example, she exemplifies spending addiction with buying a new cell phone every 16 months (Quindlen 379). If Anna Quindlen had not provided this example, she would remain ambiguous, and skeptics could misinterpret her arguments. She could have meant that the spending addiction exists …show more content…
In the beginning of her essay, she says that the occurrence of the Great Recession revealed America’s consumption addiction (Quindlen 378). In other words, the cause of the spending addiction symptom is the Great Recession. Since most Americans recognize the recession and take it seriously, they start thinking more emotionally rather than more logically. As a result, their expectations for formal evidence is lower, which gives Anna Quindlen a chance to tell them how effects of the recession proves their spending addiction without conducting any formal research or finding formal evidence from experts from their respective