Rhetorical Analysis Of Up First By Scott Simon

Scott Simon, the host of Weekend Edition Saturday and one of the hosts for NPR’s morning news podcast Up First, writes opinionated articles to share his take on events large and small. Through the choices Simon uses, he is able to grasp the attention of the citizens of America, his readers, and the followers of NPR. Simon uses a form of writing called epideictic rhetoric and supports it by establishing common ground by providing credible authors, facts, and personal experiences. He keeps a uniform look in his articles with certain types of appeal and diction to persuade his audience to accept his view on events. The type of writing Simon mainly uses is called epideictic rhetoric. This is when an author praises or sometimes blames a person

Throughout his articles, Simon uses words and phrases that are not hard to understand and do not have a negative connotation. He keeps it lighthearted but is still able to provide a punch with descriptive word choice connecting Scott Simon to his audience in a personal way. In one article written by Scott Simon, he is talking about American bagels and how they are very good “when you slather enough cream cheese on it to douse a forest fire” (Simon, 2023a). He also uses words such as gasp, exclaim, efflorescence, and zeitgeistiness. Simon’s phrase and word choice keep his audience inclined to listen because he is being humorous while knowledgeable with some more complex words. Scott Simon continues to stay lighthearted in a different article about Charles Simic by expressing his poems to a new standard. Simon (2023b) says, “...he wrote poems prolifically and gorgeously about life, death, love, animals, insects, food and what kindles imagination.” The word choice of prolifically and gorgeously tells his audience that Charles Simic produced many poems that had beauty lying within them no matter the context. By using words most people understand, Simon was able to maintain the attention of his audience to the end of his article and keep a lighthearted tone. Another way Simon shows his knowledge in diction is in his article about the runestone with the word ‘idiberug’ chiseled across it. The way we communicate was a focus of his article and to support it he uses abbreviations his audience would recognize and connect to. These included FWIW, TBH, LMAO, ILYSM, and TMI. This choice kept the audience’s focus intact as they were able to relate to the main claim of this article. Scott Simon was able to keep a uniform look through his diction choices by using positive, humorous, lighthearted, and knowledgeable words. This in return, helped his audience