The Know-It-All

For my independent reading book I am reading  The Know-It-All by A.J Jacobs. He is an editor at Esquire and has written many other notable works. This book is a memoir about A.J Jacobs journey to to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. (Crazy!) This book is divided into letters of the alphabet and for each letter he tells the reader some words that he found under that section and connects this back to his life. For the purpose of this TOW, I am going to analyze his introduction where he describes a little bit about himself, his childhood, his wife, and finally why he wants to do this in the first place.

The purpose of writing this introduction was for A.J Jacobs to give the reader some background information about himself. It was also to show them how he has become "stupider" as he has grown older and he needs to read all of this to up his "smartness". It is important for the reader to understand who they are reading about because it establishes a sense of personal connection. This leads me to the exigence. The reason A.J Jacobs really needed to write the introduction was because the reader would be completely lost with out it. Suppose Jacobs just jumped right into the letter A without letting the reader know who he was and what prompted him to want to read 33,000 pages of text. The readers would be totally confused. The audience of this book is obviously individuals who enjoy memoirs and personal stories. It is also geared towards individuals who do not need a very interesting drama-like plot or a climax to keep them hooked. A book about a man trying to read the entire Encyclopedia is very interesting, but is not going to be like a soap opera.

The rhetorical devices A.J Jacobs uses in his introduction are: pathos, sarcasm, humor, irony, ethos, anecdote, mood, and diction.

I believe that A.J Jacobs did get his message across. First by telling the reader that he graduated from Brown University establishes a sort of mutual respect. However, he tells the reader that he only remembers three things from his time at Brown and that none of them are educational. This brings A.J back down to earth. He is no longer the ivy-league genius but just a random guy. By using humor and sarcasm throughout the introduction he creates a playful and funny mood instead of a dreary educational one. All in all, he gives us some personal background details on his father, who by the way started this feat twenty years ago but only got to the B's, his wife, and his reason in reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica: to get smarter.