Rhetorical Analysis Of Silent Spring By Rachel Carson

There was once a time where the rivers were venomous, the fields were poisonous, and even the air breathed by men, women, and children alike was toxic. This is a world that Rachel Carson, the famous and honored biologist, that wrote Silent Spring, lived in and envisioned as a world that could be saved. She immediately slams down on the national arena and alarmingly claims that the environment that humans thrive in is a world seeped with death and killing, and that the use of parathion (a type of pesticide) is the agent to blame. She targets farmers who she claims poison and kill creatures that they deem as pests to their crops, including insects and even birds. In the end, she mainly targets the “authoritarian” that was given the power to take

Her diction is undoubtedly her main “weapon” that she utilizes to address the issue of pesticides. With words such as “direct target,” “poisons,” “killing,” “death,” and “lethal” in her arsenal of care and peace, she roots an alarming sense into her audience by showing pesticide as a relentless beast that causes nothing but harm. In a way, Carson amplifies the word pesticide into much more sinister concept: death. She personifies it with her dire word choice, considering it a “universal killer” (28) and a “wave of death” (50) that was perpetuated by farmers and the authoritarian. She compares the farmers who use pesticide to “judge and jury” who have “doomed” innocent creatures that they are either ignorant of or for whom they care little for (31-32). Overall, her use of diction strikes penetrating pictures into the mind of the reader that excites images of farmers, who she claims are on a “mission of death,” (22) killing so many innocents with pesticides that they induce a need for a “casualty list” (24). She shows clear disgust for farmers, considering them and their pesticides killing missions, and she excellently conveys that message while being very convincing in how detrimental pesticides