Rhetorical Analysis
The reviewed article was written in 2014 by Jess Zimmerman – a freelance writer and editor from Brooklyn. Her works were published in The Guardian, The Hairpin, and Dane Magazine. The complete title of the article is “From teen-targeting vampires to Lady Báthory’s bloodbaths, we love stories of stolen youth. What if it were possible?”. The author of the reviewed article aimed to depict the situation around the issue of people’s continuous desire to stay young and healthy forever. Moreover, the article was written from the side of possible dangerous outcomes for the young people, because the main element of the writing was the idea that the blood of the younger males and females could help senior ones become young and healthy again. However, the chosen style of presenting the material has made it complicated to mark a precise thesis of the article. From the logical point of view it should have been stated as “Does the blood matters?” or “Should the young people be scared?”.
However, the revision of the article has shown that there was no just one main idea. It was a combination of various vague thoughts and opinions of others towards the issue of youth and which methods could have been utilized in order to remain healthy and attractive as long as possible. Thus, the combination of those ideas has led to the appearance of the thesis “Is it possible for the contemporary society to develop the mechanisms of permanent regeneration in order to remain young while the ethical or legal aspects count for nothing?”. Thus, the author’s purpose of writing the article was an attempt to think over the plenty of aspects concerning blood, contemporary situation around the issue of youth, and historical examples of dealing with regeneration of the humans’ bodies.
According to the information above it could be also assumed that the author’s goal was not to explore in details the situation around kidnapping of children or adults for the purpose of utilizing their blood or organs for the regenerating issues, but to make a review of the aspects of youth instead. That is why the author did not aim to conclude something in the end, but to help the readers understand the feature of youth and give them an idea to increase their knowledge concerning that aspect. In order to give the readers a good piece of information, Jess Zimmerman used a set of strategies. However, before the analysis of utilized author’s approaches, it was necessary to figure out the main element – language (Carter & Nash, 1990). The author utilized the mix of common and academic styles of writing with prevalence of formal language. This was done due to the fact the article was written precisely for the AEON website, and thus the language had to be understandable to the majority of the Internet users. However, the article contained direct in-text citations of different scholars, and thus the elements of academic style were added. …
