Whiteout in Wyoming

Whiteout in Wyoming

This article is a comical recollection of a young college student’s trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming entitled “Whiteout in Wyoming”. He uses a journal entry structure and rhetorical appeals to enable his audience to clearly perceive his perception that Wyoming is white. Through his whole vacation there is snow everywhere, and he only encounters one minority, who I kind of got the feeling that the author didn’t consider him a “real” minority, or a minor enough minority.

It is written by a student from the University of California at Berkeley named Kevin Deenihan, who recently took a vacation to his home in Jackson Hole with his family. The article was published in the only intentionally funny journal from UC Berkeley called, “The Heuristic Squelch”. Most students from UC Berkeley read the journal, but anyone can subscribe. It is also published on the web for those who don’t feel they need six issues every year. The purpose of the article is to inform people who have never been to Wyoming how it is, but it’s mostly to entertain.

There are three structures in this argument: chronological, topical, and cause and effect. It is in journal entry style beginning February 21st and spanning for the next five days of his vacation discussing the presence of snow and the lack of minorities in Jackson Hole. It is cause and effect because he spends so many seeing one minority person that when he returns to Los Angeles he is more appreciative of them and tips his cab driver, named Ahmed, extra.

He does not use any logic to convince the audience that that Wyoming is white, but uses a deductive argument by generally noting that “for the past four years we’ve had a blizzard wherever we go skiing”. (Deenihan 2003) Then moving to a more specific Rhetorical Analysis of example, for example, “It is, in fact, snowing, and we find that a giant cloud has settled over the mountain”. (Deenihan 2003) Then He does build himself up, but not in a way that would make him more credible- quite the contrary in fact. He tells the reader that he is a weather god because clouds follow him wherever he goes. When someone says something like that, it takes away a lot of their credibility.

He appeals to the reader’s sense of humor and imagery. He almost immediately attracts the audience by an obscure account of his landscape in the second sentence.