Question

Read the excerpt below and answer the question. But … you turned to television for your window on the world: you slaked your appetite 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.

Answer 1

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.