Rhetorical Analysis Of Wild By Cheryl Strayed

We all have read a book at some point in our lifetime. Some books we loved and even reread many times, and others - well let’s just say did not even finish. Have you ever wonder why it is that a certain book caught your attention? Are you curious why you enjoyed the book so much? Have you ever thought why the author wrote the book or why the book was organized and developed the way it was? In the book, Wild, the author Cheryl Strayed made interesting rhetorical appeals that both hurt and benefit her effectiveness to relate to the reader. The author carefully and cautiously chose what and where certain parts go or even what word is the best. . In this essay, I will demonstrate Strayed’s intended audience, situation, claim, purpose, and her the

The appeal that was most obvious was her credentials. Cheryl Strayed has written many works of arts. “Her writings has appeared in The Best American Essay, The New York Times Magazine, The Rumpus, The Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, The Missouri Review, Creative Nonfiction, The Sun and elsewhere” (Strayed 317). She is a bestselling advice-essay collection book, a novelist, and an international bestselling book author of the book Wild. She wrote Wild as a memoir of her own experience using her own personal journals and memory. As she declared, “There are no composite characters or events in the book” (Strayed ix). This gives her a lot of credibility because she is saying she did not make any of this up, but this just gives her the reliability to write this book, her character and ethics are

Most people who read this book would not know where the Pacific Crest Trail is located. Strayed inserted a map at the being of the book to help the reader know where she was during her distant hike. She incorporates many numbers to describe how much water she had left and how many miles she had to get to the next water source, as well as the time it would take her to get there. For instance, she exhaustedly reported, “I was three miles away from the next water tank, I had eight ounces of water left. Then six. Then four” (Strayed 193). Eight ounces of water for three miles is not that much. When she would talk about what day she was on she would always mention it on the first sentence. For instance she would say “On the first day,” “On the second day,” “On the third day,” and so forth. She flamboyantly descried each place she went to and each person she encountered. She gave me the sense that I was doing the hike, not her. She purposely talks about what was on T.V, the O. J. Simpson Trail, to get give us a sense of what time frame she went to hike the PCT. The way she described everything and how she presented her ideas, going back into the book recalling information helped me understand the book more. For example, she proclaimed, “They were the first people I’d seen since the two guys in the minivan with the Colorado plates who’d dropped me