Singing the Pink Blues

In Ancillary 1, I chose the article "Singing the Pink Blues" by Margot Mifflin. In preparation for my paper, I just read the article over and over again, each time writing down the strategies Mifflin was using on each page or paragraph. After writing them down, I looked them up to find out the exact definition, then went back to the article to see if I can find more examples of that specific strategy in any other part of the article, so I can work it in to my essay. I ended up choosing the three rhetorical strategies I saw the most, which were repetition, punctuation, and comparing and contrasting. The rhetorical strategy that most affected how the essay communicates to its audience was her use of punctuation. Mifflin's use of punctuation in this article included dashes and parentheses, and in the parentheses she would write a comment on her last sentence, or even place it right in the middle of a sentence. Before the parentheses she would write something about the toys or the makers, then inside the parentheses write something sarcastic like "But she's an action figure -- what can she do?" It was her way of putting her own personal comments into her article, and also if she named a game or toy, she used the parentheses to explain what that game was about and how it's played. I chose this strategy because I felt it helps clarify things much more for the audience, and that's what you need--your audience to understand exactly what you're writing about and how it works, especially if you're arguing against something, like toy makers still practicing segregation for instance.