TOW #12 - Nickel and Dimed (IRB Part 1)

     As interesting as it sounded, Nickel and Dimed was also interestingly written with many different rhetorical devices that worked together along with the investigation itself. As Barbara Ehrenreich flew around places to observe what it was like to live on minimum wage in American cities, I found myself right next to her, following her around, which was a sensation that I'd only felt in fiction novels or emotional memoirs, not an informative nonfiction piece like this one. Although Barbara Ehrenreich keeps her duty as a writer and journalist in reporting facts of what happened during her investigation as a minimum-wage worker, she incorporates metaphoric language and appropriate quotes from her surroundings to keep her reader engaged and feel like they're a part of this way of living.
     Throughout her book, she incorporates facts and figures from this personal experience that she went through while cleaning tables as well as research from outside sources. She organizes her personally collected data by clearly stating the situations of her fellow employees at restaurants in indented forms:

"Gail is sharing a room...for $250 a week...The rent would be impossible alone.

Claude, the Haitian cook, is desperate to get out of the two-room apartment...

Marianne...and her boyfriend are paying $170 a week for a one-person trailer."

While this gives a numerical view on what kind of financial situation her surrounding people are in, she also includes footnotes at the bottom of the paper to expand upon specific topics that she experienced. After she explains the home situation as shown above, she includes the researched statistic that "...nearly one-fifth of all homeless people...are employed in full- or part-time jobs" (Ehrenreich 26). This gives the readers the objective, journalistic side of the story in a microscopic as well as a macroscopic outlook. Although pure objective facts are pretty interesting, she puts these facts under a captivating light through her intricate language style.
     Ehrenreich's well-polished metaphors provides good imagery for readers to picture what it would feel like to work minimum-wage jobs, as compared to simply looking at numeric data. This is a part numbers cannot explain - only hands-on experiences can. While describing a busy, full-packed restaurant she worked in with a terrible sanitary environment, she tells the readers to "Picture a fat person's hell, and I don't mean a place with no food...The kitchen is a cavern, a stomach leading to the lower intestine that is the garbage and dishwashing area, from which issue bizarre smells combining the edible and the offal: creamy carrion, pizza barf...citrus fart" (29). Not only does she have to deal with this horrific-sounding atmosphere, but she also has to deal with managers that keep screaming, "Nita, your order's up, move it!" or "Barbara, didn't you see you've got another table out there? Come on, girl!" (34). Her descriptive language along with the dialogues she constantly heard around her places the reader in the spot where she was as a minimum-wage worked. This gives the readers insight to the direct experience that she had aimed to investigate and write about.
     This is one of the first nonfiction reads with so much numerical data I've thoroughly enjoyed and completely immersed myself into, but at the same time Ehrenreich's craft is very effective in story-telling as well. I hope to be able to broaden my scope and understand how life runs from other people's perspective as well. So far, Ehrenreich seems to be doing that job very well.