Read the excerpt below and answer the question. But … you turned to television for your window on the world: you slaked your app
etite for information, for stories, for beginnings, middles and ends, with the easy tasty substances of the screen in the living room ….You lulled yourself to sleep with visions of violence, and the cruder stokes of human action and reaction; stories in which every simple action has a simple motive nothing is inexplicable, and even God moves in an un-mysterious way. ("The City of Invention," pp. 11-12) What is the effect of the use of the pronoun "you" in this excerpt from a persuasive essay? It pulls the reader into the text. It draws a contrast. It appeals to the reader's experiences. It makes the reader feel silly and uneducated.
Use of the second person (the pronoun “you”), over the first
and third person, is a technique that an author will use in order to better
interact with readers and engage them.
When one reads the pronoun “you,” one will generally feel as if the
author or writer of a text is speaking directly to him or her. This will, most evidently, draw readers into
what they are reading because the message will seem more personal with the use
of second person than with first or third.
With that in mind, of the possible responses for this question, “A. It
pulls the reader into the text,” seems to be the most appropriate.
