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Failure Is A Good Thing By John Carroll Analysis

Decent Essays

The Failure to Fail Is Your Enemy
What do you think when you think of failure? An “E” on a test? A person living in poverty? In John Carroll’s Failure is a Good Thing, he uses his family and experiences to show the importance of failure and the connection it has to life lessons. He expresses and adds to this idea in the passage through using life experiences as examples, implementing feelings to the reader, and through his voice. In the passage he expresses his ideas through example of failure being a good thing in his life. For instance, he uses the example “ I earn my living by writing a daily newspaper column.”(Carroll) He later goes on in the paragraph to tell how failure affects his job as a daily newspaper columnist. He also uses his family as examples. For instance second to last paragraph he says “ my daughter is a trapeze artist .”(Carroll) He later says “She risked failure and profound public embarrassment in order to feed her soul. And if she can do that 15 feet in the air, we all …show more content…

For example, he says “ I wished for her success. I was lying.”(Carroll) The use of “I” in the sentences help determine if the voice is formal or not. Furthermore, it contains complex words which shows his vocabulary is astounding. For instance, he says “A successful column usually means that I am treading on familiar ground, going with the tricks that work, preaching to the choir or dressing up popular sentiments in fancy words.”(Carroll) The use of the words “treading” and “sentiments” demonstrates proper use of complex words. He uses these characteristics of his voice to his advantage. The informal voice makes him sound like a common man and the complex words help show he is well educated. He uses the appearance as a well educated common man to make him sound convincing and still respectable, thus maximizing the amount of audience that will be convinced of his argument (failure is a good

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