Analysis Of Richard Louv's Last Child In The Woods

In 2008, Last Child in the Woods was written by Richard Louv. In one section of the book, Louv develops an argument that states that technology has separated people, specifically those of the technological generation, from nature. In the passage from Last Child in the Woods, Louv uses anaphora, rhetorical questions, and appeals to ethos to develop his argument regarding the gap technology is forming between people and nature. Firstly, Louv uses anaphora in the passage from Last Child in the Woods to emphasize the growing cavity between people and nature. Louv specifically points out the differences between generations, emphasizing the fact that the generation of technology is more so cut off from nature compared to the generation before it, especially in his final paragraph, which he writes, “‘Yes,” we’ll say, ‘it’s true. We actually looked out the car window.’ In our useful boredom, we used our fingers to draw pictures on fogged glass as we watched telephone poles tick by. We saw birds on the wires and combines in the fields. We were fascinated with roadkill, and we counted cows and horses and coyotes and shaving-cream signs. We stared with a kind of reverence at the horizon, as thunderheads and dancing rain moved with us. We held our little plastic cars against the glass and pretended that they, too, were racing toward some unknown destination. We considered the past and dreamed of the future, and watched it all go by in the blink

In doing so, he ensures that the readers walk away from his writing thinking of the unnecessarity of technology and how it distracts one from nature. He encourages the reader to think about what they can do to minimize the amount of technology in their life so they may be more attuned to nature. In short, Robert Louv wisely uses rhetorical devices to form a persuasive