Editing A Modest Proposal (section)

==Rhetoric==
Author Charles K. Smith argues that Swift's rhetorical style persuades the reader to detest the speaker and pity the Irish. Swift's specific strategy is twofold, using a "trap"<ref name="Smith_p135">Smith, ''Toward a Participatory Rhetoric'', p. 135</ref> to create sympathy for the Irish and a dislike of the narrator who, in the span of one sentence, "details vividly and with rhetorical emphasis the grinding poverty" but feels emotion solely for members of his own class.<ref name="Smith_p136">Smith, ''Toward a Participatory Rhetoric'', p. 136</ref> Swift's use of gripping details of poverty and his narrator's cool approach towards them create "two opposing points of view" that "alienate the reader, perhaps unconsciously, from a narrator who can view with 'melancholy' detachment a subject that Swift has directed us, rhetorically, to see in a much less detached way."<ref name="Smith_p136"/>

Swift has his proposer further degrade the Irish by using language ordinarily reserved for animals. Lewis argues that the speaker uses "the vocabulary of animal husbandry"<ref name="Smith_p138">Smith, ''Toward a Participatory Rhetoric'', p. 138</ref> to describe the Irish. Once the children have been commodified, Swift's rhetoric can easily turn "people into animals, then meat, and from meat, logically, into tonnage worth a price per pound".<ref name="Smith_p138"/>

Swift uses the proposer's serious tone to highlight the absurdity of his proposal. In making his argument, the speaker uses the conventional, textbook-approved order of argument from Swift's time (which was derived from the Latin rhetorician [[Quintilian]]).<ref name="Smith_p139">Smith, ''Toward a Participatory Rhetoric'', p. 139</ref> The contrast between the "careful control against the almost inconceivable perversion of his scheme" and "the ridiculousness of the proposal" create a situation in which the reader has "to consider just what perverted values and assumptions would allow such a diligent, thoughtful, and conventional man to propose so perverse a plan".<ref name="Smith_p139"/>