A Rhetorical Analysis Of The New Greatest Generation By Joel Stein

In the article named The New Greatest Generation, Joel Stein conveys that “millennials’ self-involvement is more a continuation of a trend than a revolutionary break from previous generations. They’re not a new species; they’ve just mutated to adapt to their environment” (Stein 31). He supports this suggestion by first using logos to advance his claim, and then by using sentence variety and a conversational tone. Stein’s purpose is to show that the way that millennials act is just a small change from what previous generations did in order to illustrate the usefulness of millennials. Furthermore, he establishes an informal tone, that starts out negative but then becomes positive, for the readers of Time Magazine and older generations that look down upon the behaviours of millennials. All in all, the combination of these elements in Stein’s captivating writing makes him an effective writer.

He uses many statistics in his article, like how the “median age for an American woman’s first marriage went from 20.6 in 1967 to 26.9 in 2011”(Stein 31), to justify and support his claims with hard, irrefutable facts. Stein has a common pattern of first introducing a topic with a comparison, an opinion, or an assumption, and then provides a reasoning or analysis for it. He finally uses logos near the end of his topic, ending it with data that cannot be countered, and uses it to powerfully display to his audience that his topic statements are correct. This greatly helps further his goal of convincing the audience that his claim is