Text 1 Persuasive Speech

Over the course of America’s 200 year history, human innovation has only increased. We went from log cabins to skyscrapers, horse-riding to gas-powered vehicles. Human ingenuity has not only made our lives easier, but also safer. Our greatest inventions lie in creating renewable energy and averting water-borne disasters through what we call the dam. Despite the obvious benefits of a dam, op-ed contributor Yvon Chouinard and magazine contributor Bruce Barcott feel differently; they want dams to not exist. Chouinard’s Text 1 is a persuasive paper, making use of cold-hard facts and allusions to the fearsome global warming and America’s beloved economy, in order to convince us that dams are bad in all perspectives. Barcott’s Text 2 takes a different path to a similar conclusion: he utilizes the American love of freedom and shocking metaphors to show that dams should be blown up. …show more content…
Chouinard 's go-to sentence structure is short, and to the point. His paragraphs ' topic sentences are curt, even going so far to blatantly state what he thinks, as in “New dams are a bad idea,”. This sentence structure serves to implant his most important themes in readers ' heads. Barcott is more subtle (but just as successful) in embedding his argument in our minds. He chooses to list every dammed waterway and occasionally compare dams to another large famous structure, which to us, are shocking revelations. Since most of his essay is comprised of the list-type sentence, it results in subliminal messaging of our damnation of American