Rhetorical Analysis Of An American Soldier

Our countries soldiers don’t get to voice the daily hardships that they endure. Through an email message to his friends and family, this American soldier gets a chance to portray his typical day to day experiences overseas. The readers get to hear a story from a unique point of view: that of a soldier in 2003-2004 in Iraq. He effectively gets his readers to truly feel what he would feel through his appeal to the audience, their pathos and ethos, and through the tone and diction that appears within the email.
He begins the email by saying that “we are going to take a small mental voyage.”(2) By grouping himself with the audience he automatically made himself a credible source. He put himself on the same level as the readers and makes them feel like they are joining the soldier on his daily routine. This appeals to their ethos and actually makes the reader more likely to listen to the arguments that he presents to them. The reader’s pathos is also appealed to within the email. The soldier
He uses blunt tone to help get his point across. The soldier tells the readers that “the smell, snoring, and social graces will be just like living with my nine tent mates” (14-15). This exaggeration helps to create the feeling of a cramped and uncomfortable living space. Similarly, he uses hyperboles such as “I went back to the tent and felt like either crying or lighting myself on fire to remove the filth” (26-27). These hyperboles help to make the living conditions seem almost unbearable to the average American citizen. The author is very effective using those methods but the diction within the essay help to bring the essay together. The diction is informal and almost so informal that the reader feels like they might be talking to a close friend. He states that “It gets really freakin’ cold here at night” (23-24). By this point in the email the author has the audience wrapped around his