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Rhetorical Analysis Of It's Just Work By Annie Dillard

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Rhetorical Analysis Writer, Annie Dillard, in her narrative essay, “It’s Not Talent; It’s Just Work,” opposes the idea of talent and instead argues that greatness is achieved by working hard and using discipline to hone in on abilities. In Annie Dillard’s “It’s Not Talent; It’s Just Work”, she effectively constructs her argument that talent is not crucial for triumph but is achieved through great effort as well as using discipline to enhance abilities by using logical appeals, personal anecdotes, and repetition. Her purpose is to reach out to an audience who believes that success is natural due to one’s talent. Dillard opens her essay about hard work being the key to success by emphasizing logically that any great accomplishment takes work …show more content…

She illustrates being an example when she describes, “Now, it happens that when I wrote my first book of prose, I worked an hour or two a day for a while, and then in the last two months, I got excited and worked very hard, for many hours a day.” Dillard uses this anecdote in order to strengthen her argument in proving that her claim, work leads to success is true because she is evidence of it. The anecdote conveys a connection to Dillard’s audience because she is being personal and sincere in trying to show the audience that her claim is true as seen through her. Dillard continues her use of anecdotes in her essay by analyzing her own life and connecting it to her claim that success takes work. Dillard narrates, “So many times when I was in college, I used to say of a course like seventeenth-century poetry or European history, ‘I didn’t like it at first, but now I like it.’ All of life is like that--a sort of dreary course which gradually gets interesting if you work at it.”(2). Dillard appeals to the audience by creating an example that is sincere and personal which makes her point more real to the readers. The use of anecdotes is important because it makes a connection between the author and her point so that the idea that success comes from work can be

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