I get lost in the kitchen too.

Lost in the Kitchen by Steve Barry is an amusing story written about how men are basically hopeless in the kitchen. The story is taken from Barry’s own Thanksgiving experience in which he and his friend, Gene, unsuccessfully attempt to make themselves useful in preparing dinner. The two bumbling men are asked to carry out one specific job. WATCH THE CHILDREN. As Barry states in his essay. “You cannot watch small children and the Detroit Lions at the same time, and lets face it, the Detroit Lions are more interesting.” Barry ends his essay telling the reader about how most men rarely prepare food in the kitchen, and when they do, it’s their one special dish.

I personally found Dave Barry’s essay lighthearted and humorous, but that is not what I am going to talk about. I found quite a few rhetorical devices contained within Barry’s essay, but the one that I noticed the most was appositives. It is my opinion that Dave Barry used appositives to help his writing style to be wittier. Those few words within the commas impact the mood of the story drastically. After I first read this essay, I reread it without the appositives, and found it to be somewhat bland. The humor had seemed to just disappear from the essay.

The other thing that caught my eye was Dave Barry’s use of commoratio, which is repetition of a point several times in different words. This whole essay is about Dave Barry telling his reader how men are useless in the kitchen. He says in the first sentence “Men are still basically scum when it comes to helping out in the kitchen.” Later on the same page, Barry states “most men make themselves as useful around the kitchen as ill-trained Labrador retrievers.”

Although this essay is short, it is definitely in my opinion, one of the best essays in the bunch. He doesn’t use compassion to touch your heart, but rather his sense of humor, to tickle your funny bone!