Examining Carson’s of Rhetorical Strategies in Silent Spring

Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, uses many rhetorical strategies to convey her central argument that the poison, Parathion, is used unethically and should be banned from all use. One strategy she uses is appealing to the audience’s morals and values which makes the reader care about the topic a lot more than if they had no connection to the topic. A great way she does this is by the wording she uses which relate to death and war. Which brings me to another strategy where she purposely uses words to make the reader emotionally connected. This helps present ethical situations where you can only help but be on her side.

Using appeals to values and morals is a great way strategy because it connects directly to the person even if they are not affected by the situation you are writing about. When she says an innocent stroller could walk into the fields that were deadly without even knowing, you can’t help but reason with that, because everybody would want to know if they were walking into a field of deadly poison. These are the types of things she does, another way she appeals to the audiences morals is when she says that parathion isn’t specific to blackbirds, but kills raccoons and rabbits. Most people, whether good or bad, couldn’t help but to feel for the innocent animals being killed. So if you’re a person who isn’t affected too much by the killing of innocent animals, she brings up another point. There is a much simpler way to solve the farmers problems, switch to a deeper eared corn. Simpling switching corn type could solve the problem but they choose to kill. This is a great way to get the reader on your side, because if killing doesn’t mean much to you, and then you find out there are better ways to solve the problem where the killing doesn’t need to happen; You might feel bad for the animals being killed when they really don’t have to.

When she picks words such as casualty list, habit of killing, mission of death, and needless war, it emotionally connects to almost everybody and if not emotionally, in some way or another war will connect to your life. If you were directly or indirectly affected by war in your life, you are more likely to support the writer because they appear to relate to you as well. The word selection really helps make connects to everybody, and when you make connects to war and death while reading about a controversial topic such as this poison, you are likely to side with the banning of it because it reminds you of war which is never really a happy topic. So because she relates everything to war and death, it makes people think of these two things when they think of the specific situation thus making the topic seem worse then it might actually be. Therefore, using the strategies she uses, she has a high chance of convincing the audience to support her cause because they are essentially dragged into supporting her and caring about her argument.

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