Rhetorical Analysis On Daddy Issues

A rhetorical analysis of Daddy issues.

The essay Daddy issues is written by Sandra Tsing Loh, a writer and a daughter of aging parents. The subject of the essay is aging parents and how it affects their children’s life. The writer presented in an informal and intimate format. The writer blends several authors of books on aging parents and her own personal experience together to write an essay that not only is entertaining but also educational. The books that are the writer chose to review are: The Bill from My Father, By Bernard Cooper, and Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos into Confidence by Gail Sheehy. Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents—and Ourselves By Jane Gross. The essay targets all readers, however it is aiming more …show more content…
In this essay the writer reviews not only one, but three books on the same subject, making the reader feel that the writer has researched the subject of aging parents. The writer includes informative quotes from the books to help give the reader some background on the statistics of the aging population. The writer continues to convey her creditability by using good comparisons in the essay so that the reader is able to understand what it is like to have aging parents for some people. For example: “We can at least plan employment breaks around such relative foreseeable as pregnancy, the school year, and holidays. By contrast, ailing seniors trigger crises at random—falls in the bathroom, trips to the emergency room, episodes of wandering and forgetting and getting lost”. Another good example is when the writer used a quote from a Chides Gross: “The daughter track is, by a wide margin, harder than the mommy track, emotionally and practically, because it has no happy ending and such an erratic and unpredictable course.” This is used to help others who don’t have aging parents to fully understand what it means to care for an aging parent. Although she proves she is creditable on the subject of aging ageing parents, she uses tone as an important rhetorical …show more content…
The writer tone is depressing, negative and an almost malicious undertone. The writer starts the essay off making the reader feel like she is upset with her father is living due to being forced to care for her aging parents. She continues thought the essay to write in a somber view of caring for her aging parents. A good example is when she sates that she is like a Kafka character who kills himself even though he has much to live for. Another statement the writer used to build tone in the essay was one that could be deemed as morbid: I almost don’t know what I envy Bernard Cooper for more—his incomparable literary genius or the fact that his father is dead. Wishing one’s parent was dead goes against all social norms, this leads to the tone of the essay being grim, dark and depressing. The use of negativity and resentment ensure the readers would be aware of the writers tone. The writer continues to develop this tone by inserting statements that seems against social norms, for example: With a sudden angry snort, my father woke up. I won’t say I wish I had hit him over the head with a frying pan to finish the job when it seemed we were so, so close. This showed in a passive aggressive way that she seems to want her father to die. Another example of the writer using a negative tone is when she is discussing Thomas, her Dad’s care giver who stated that he could help her dad live longer and she wrote ”Oh my God—how could he say