TOW #7

In “Getting In” by Malcolm Gladwell, the author employs the rhetorical strategy of repetition to support his idea that the pressure to get into top colleges is constant and repetitive for students in the United States. Malcolm Gladwell is a well-known writer, speaker, and journalist for the New Yorker. He attended college at the University of Toronto in Canada, as he recalls in his essay, and first heard of the competitive nature of U.S. college admissions soon after arriving in the country. Gladwell writes about how this surprised him and varied quite a bit from his experience with college admissions in Canada. He explores the purpose and reasoning for the prominence of this idea of getting into the best of the best schools. In the essay, Gladwell discusses the competitiveness revolving around college admissions in the United States and the pressure to get into a top university. He makes a point about this by writing, “the precocious and sensitive protagonist always went to Harvard; if he was troubled, he dropped out of Harvard; in the end he returned to Harvard to complete his senior thesis” (Gladwell 4). By repeating the name Harvard three times in one sentence, Gladwell makes a bold statement about how prevalent these prestigious Ivy League schools are in American society and that the proud, outspoken nature of the colleges creates stress for applicants to want to get in. The repetition of the prominent university name shows how Malcolm Gladwell believes that it is talked about far too often in the ambitious United States society, making the name almost seem redundant for people and students. I found that this device greatly aided in Gladwell’s strive to achieve his purpose throughout his essay. It made me think about and question the stress that society puts on students and that students put on themselves as well to get accepted into schools like Harvard.