Rhetorical devices

Rhetorical questions

In the article “Innocence lost: what did you do before the internet?” Leah McLaren uses several rhetorical questions to engage the readers in the topic. 

The first rhetorical question invites readers to think about the past and evokes nostalgia: “How did he sit there all day, I wonder, without the internet to keep him company?” (ll. 10-11). The second rhetorical question – “When that happens, what will be lost?” (ll. 15-16) – invites readers to think about the future of technology. The author claims that soon there will be no one alive who has experienced life before the internet. 

Then, the rhetorical question “is it possible to regain innocence lost?” (ll. 35-36) engages the readers and introduces the second part of the article. The rhetorical question is followed by the author’s personal childhood stories, which partly show how younger generations could work tow...