The excerpt provided from The Great Influenza uses multiple forms of rhetoric. The author, Barry, uses these rhetorical strategies to characterize scientific research. In characterizing scientific research, Barry uses strategies such as parallelism, deductive reasoning, and diction. These rhetorical strategies create a tone for the passage and provide supporting evidence for any claim the author may make. Parallelism is the way a sentence is structure in which similar words are used to support a specific claim. There are multiple examples of Barry using parallelism in this passage. One is in paragraph four, “There a single step can take them through the looking glass into a world that seems entirely different, and if they are at least partly correct their probing acts like a crystal to precipitate an order out of chaos, to create form, structure, and direction.” This is a very detailed sentence, but the parallelism does not come out until the end. When Barry is describing the probing acts, he mentions creating form. In creating form, one must also create structure and direction. Form is the organization of a particular thing based on being structured and having …show more content…
Barry uses deductive reasoning by comparing generalizations to things done in the past. For instance, in paragraph two, Barry states “For as Claude Bernard, the French physiologist of the nineteenth century said, “Science teaches us to doubt”.” Barry uses this example to go from what he described as uncertainty in general, to what a past physiologist once said. Later, in the third paragraph, Barry references Einstein. In doing so, he compares when a scientist may find a difference in their outcome and the one set in stone. Einstein refused to accept his own findings on a particular topic because of this. Because Barry compares what he states to two important people from the past, he uses deductive