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Leonid Fridman's Essay America Needs Its Nerds

553 Words3 Pages

“America Needs Its Nerds” an article created by Leonid Fridman, puts forth a pertinent issue in today’s society: intellectually adept students are ostracized. Fridman argues that smart, curious students need to stop feeling ashamed for being smart and curious. Society needs to change because their current philosophy towards intellect is one of pessimism. Fridman develops these arguments in his essay by utilizing the rhetorical strategy of parallelism, drawing conclusions, and through his use of diction. In his essay Leonid Fridman uses parallelism two ways: through sentence structure and in the progression of the essay. Parallelism in sentence structure is precisely shown in lines 3-4 when Fridman says, “Intellectually curious and academically serious.” The words are grammatically similar, with similar sounding pronunciations and identical suffixes. Parallelism appears again in lines 17-18 when the author says, “Nerds are ostracized while athletes are idolized.” “Ostracized” and “idolized” exemplify parallelism in sentence structure because of their pronunciation and endings. Each enhances their …show more content…

In lines 35-40, Fridman compares the anti-intellectualism in America to East Asian countries’ pro-intellectualism. Then later, In lines 41-46, Fridman provides another international comparison, but this time is he was comparing the amount of money earned by professors in other countries and the earnings of professional athletes in the US. Fridman suggests in these comparative examples that America is behind the pro-intelligence movement. He uses these examples to enhance his argument of why America should be more accepting to smart and curious students and also give the reader a sense of patriotism so that they will take pride in their country to solve the problem at hand. These connections to international situations help the reader understand and agree with his position. They add to the persuasiveness of the

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