Maureen Dowd Rhetorical Analysis

Maureen Dowd published her article “As Time Goes Bye” on March 5th. She begins with a one-idea sentence, “Auspicious my debut at Time was not.” This conveys the truth in the fact that her time at Time Magazine wasn’t a very successful. What this also does, is set the tone of the article, which is a reminiscent one. It also makes the reader wonder why it wasn’t very good, which is pretty engaging. Following, she begins to speak about an experience she had at Time. “I thought my first Monday morning story conference would be my last,” another one idea sentence, conveying the implication that she was very anxious/nervous about her first conference. The chief called on Dowd first, asking her about the prospect of the Time cover on salt, and she replied with “My mom puts salt on everything; she’s not worried about it.” As Dowd continues to speak about how a veteran reporter corrected her as to what exactly “Salt” was, Dowd set up an expectation for the reader. The expectation that she had made an extremely stupid mistake, and ruined her first conference, because the veteran said that salt was “SALT II [Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty].”
In the next paragraph, she ironically showed that this was false, and she was right to talk about table salt. It’s ironic because you’d expect that this well-known magazine would be more serious and professional, but for them to write about table salt is just unexpected. Afterwards, she explains the atmosphere of Time, by saying that “One week, the Ayatollah Khomeini was the villain on the cover, the next week, Salt the Killer. One week, your worked on Qaddafi hit squads; the next, cats.” She uses parallelism to describe the place, which offers the effect of logical coordination. In the next paragraph, she explains the occasion that she is writing about Time magazine for, which is that “Headlines about Time Warner’s breakup with Time Inc. sent [her] into a reverie about my salad days in Time’s glory days.” When she says “glory