Barbara Jordan Rhetorical Strategies

Understanding the Process
“I am being educated finally” (Barbara Jordan). Barbara Jordan’s Becoming Educated is an autobiography in which her use of rhetorical strategies shows specific details of her college life to make her message clear on how she becomes educated, and the struggles of gaining reasoning skills.
In the excerpt from this novel, Jordan is narrating her struggle with gaining reasoning skills, and how important they are to learn. In line thirty-eight, Jordan recalls her time in debate with a reference to the notecards that are used with counterarguments on them; “even in debate it was pretty much canned because you had, in your little three by five box, a response for whatever issue might be raised by the opposition” (L38-39). The reference of the notecards as “a “little three-by-five box” is a metaphor for how they were, in reality, trapping her self-expression and keeping her from mentally expanding to be a thoughtful human who could think for herself. Jordan herself says this, “the format was structured so that there was no opportunity for independent thinking” (L39-40). She felt

When she uses this rhetorical device, she is revealing to her reader how she had lost numerous hours of sleep and put in even more hours of hard work and thinking so that she could understand her cases. “I had to stay up. I had to” (L11). Jordan felt she needed to work, so that she could understand her cases in her chosen field. Barbara Jordan uses parallel structure and repeats the ideas in a sentence to make the importance of the words feel heavy. “You had to talk out the issues, the facts, the case, the decisions, the process” (L23). This makes her point clear to her readers, by repeatedly bringing attention to the idea and making the sentence heavier where the ideas are, and brings her frenzied yet organized emotions into the