In his essay Working at Wendy’s, Joey Franklin challenges the negative preconceived notions of fast food jobs as invaluable and depressing work. Franklin uses his personal experience working at Wendy's to shape a person’s outlook on personal responsibility and societal expectations. In this essay on such an important topic, Franklin finds a way to engage readers through humor and clear examples in order to connect with his audience and get his message across. Through his use of polysyndeton and vivid imagery, Franklin challenges readers' preconceived notions about minimum-wage jobs and persuades them to see that said jobs do have value in our society. Ultimately, he seeks to change people’s perspective about not only minimum-wage jobs, but …show more content…
By showing these feelings, Franklin hopes to humanize the workers by making them individuals that want respect. He connects with the audience because everyone wants to be respected and be seen in a positive light. Franklin’s use of polysyndeton creates a mood of nostalgia and regret that he wants the readers to understand. While trying to express his feelings when he says, “As an eleven-year-old, pivoting on that blurry edge between boyhood and adolescence, I found myself bragging to my friends about the prospect of free pizza and then wishing I hadn’t told them anything about my father’s job”, he implies how societies’ perceptions of “respectable jobs” and how they see people who don’t have those jobs (Franklin 47). The repetition of “and” shows how quick his realization of societies’ biases and how much this experience affected him because of how much he remembered it. This amplifies his message that society’s judgements about work can affect individuals from a young age. Franklin connects with his readers through that moment so they can remember a moment where they felt the same in their own