Lost in the Kitchen

After reading the required ten essays and a few more, I found that one essay stood out in my mind. Lost in the Kitchen by Dave Barry was entertaining, funny, and made total sense to me. The introduction grabbed my attention when the example of Thanksgiving dinner preparations came into view. Barry’s purpose in this essay was to explain why men don’t help out in the kitchen, and Thanksgiving is a perfect example. It was Barry’s opening sentence that really grabbed my attention: “Men are basically scum when it comes to helping out in the kitchen.” The word choice is what makes this sentence grab our attention. “Scum” is a harsh word to use when referring to the entire male race, but when it’s a man stating this; it softens this harsh word and lightens the mood of the essay.
As for rhetorical devices, Barry right off the bat used a simile on page 61: “…most men make themselves as useful around the kitchen as ill-trained Labrador retrievers.” On page 62, anaphora is used: “I realize this is awful. I realize this sounds just like Ozzie and Harriet. I also realize that here are some males out there, with hyphenated last names, who have advanced much farther than Gene and I have, who are not afraid to stay home full time and get coated with baby vomit while their wives work as test pilots, and who go into the kitchen on a daily basis to prepare food for other people, as opposed to going in there to get a beer and maybe some peanut butter on a spoon.” Imagery was also used in this essay to further explain why men are afraid to enter the kitchen. “Surrounding Arlene are thousands of steaming cooking containers… She quickly becomes enshrouded in steam.”
Another rhetorical device that was used on page 62 was asyndeton. “I think most males rarely prepare food for others, and when they do, they have their one specialty dish (spaghetti, in my case) that they prepare maybe twice a year in a very elaborate production, for which they expect to be praised as if they had developed, right there in the kitchen, a cure for heart disease.” This brings me to sentence length. The last example I gave you was a long sentence that carried on and on. Most of the sentences in this essay were shorter, but others were longer. There was a good balance between stretched out and compressed sentences making Lost in the Kitchen flow extremely well. Barry’s tone throughout this essay is easy going and humorous.
Contributing to the tone was the absence of statistics. Statistics were not used in this essay because it was more of an experience-based writing making it more enjoyable as I see it. Because Barry used real-life examples it made it easier for the reader to relate to what he was trying to get through. Lost in the Kitchen was a light essay, but I got a lot out of it.