Close Reading (Sept. 23)

Rethinking Sleep
In "Rethinking Sleep," David Randall attempts to form and connect ideas that break the reader away from preconceived notions about sleep. Today, it is widely accepted that the average person must sleep, uninterrupted, through an eight-hour night in order to receive the necessary amount of rest essential to living out the remainder of the day. However, taking advantage of detailed data, opening conjunctions, and word connotation, Randall makes an effort to cause the reader to accept the idea that, perhaps, an interrupted session of sleep is not so bad after all.

Details are arguably the very foundation of Randall's essay. Rather than trying to reason with the reader, he does what so many grammar instructors try to get their students to do: show, don't tell. Immediately after personalizing the essay in the first paragraph, he causes the reader to understand the magnitude and importance of the issue through the use of statistics, saying "roughly 41 million people in the United States...get six hours or fewer of sleep at night." With the problem well established, he can spend the rest of the article discussing solutions.

Using data in this way causes the readers to question the system in which they live. Why, if we know all these things, do we continue to operate in damaging ways? Particularly effective is Randall's reference to research in historical sleep practices. "Segmented sleep," as he calls it, was normal even back when Chaucer wrote the "Canterbury Tales." As a counterbalance so that we cannot push that evidence aside as outdated ancient practices, Randall later provides evidence that such sleeping methods are being used even now with beneficial results. With such unmistakeable data, the reader has no choice but to accept that current sleep methods are unsatisfactory.

Plain data, however, would be completely ineffective if it were merely jumbled together with no connections through syntax to organize the thoughts. Though conjunctions as sentence openers are often frowned upon in formal writing, Randall uses them to emphasize connections, making the article flow. For example, after telling us the current solution to the sleep problem, his next sentence says, "But this directive may be part of the problem." By starting a sentence with a conjunction, Randall gives the reader a whole period's worth of time to think about the previous sentence before he destroys it with the word "but." He uses this technique multiple times throughout the article, each time stating the reader's current way of thinking, then providing a conjunction opener, magnifying the statement that follows to create better contrast.

Lastly, Randall chooses his words carefully to gain the support of his readers. Most notably, when he writes about "doctors who peddle sleep aid products" and what causes people to "reach for sleeping pills," he takes advantage of the negative connotation to portray the pharmacists as a sort of drug dealer, providing sleep-addicted customers with pills. Though he writes that the doctors are "unintentionally reinforcing" a potentially damaging idea, the connotation behind the words infer some horrific plot behind sleep aids.

Using these rhetorical techniques, David Randall shows his audience the misconceptions in today's ideas about sleep. Sleep is most certainly one of the most important factors of our lives. But our ideas about the "ideal sleeping session" may be far off the mark. Millions of people in the US are sleep deprived because they misunderstand the fact that waking up in the night is not an indicator of a stressed mind.