Demerath-Shanti 1

Keshava Demerath-Shanti

Teacher Elizabeth Cyr

English 11

21 October 2019

“This is Water,” Being Aware of the World Around Us.

In his 2005 ​commencement speech ¨This is Water¨ at Kenyon College, David 

Foster Wallace suggests​ that It is important to consciously choose how we are going to

perceive the most boring and mundane parts of day-to-day life, because our freedom to

choose is the only thing we can know to be T true.

​Wallace uses a metaphorical story with a rhetorical question, “What the hell is 

water?” to introduce his argument. Wallace supports his suggestion with claims which 

he supports using examples of boring adult life, and sarcastically using metaphorical 

stories and clichés. Wallace's purpose is to make people be conscious of, and question 

their default settings, so that they can make a conscious decision on how they're going 

to perceive their lives. Wallace is not only appealing to the graduating class, but also to 

their parents and anyone else who will inevitably experienced the frustration of 

day-to-day life. 

Wallace's first claim is that the purpose of an education is to give us the ability 

to choose what to think about. He is appealing to logos with this claim by drawing a 

connection between graduate’s educations and the argument he is about to make. 

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Wallace supports his claim with evidence in the form of a metaphorical story in which 

two people derive different meanings from the same situation, which he uses to 

illustrate the importance of knowing how to choose what to think about.  

Wallace also uses this evidence to illustrate how sometimes our way of 

perceiving a situation can make us closed-minded and trapped by our own belief 

templates. Wallace uses this to introduce his next claim, that being arrogant and 

self-centered are our default settings for perceiving the world. Wallace appeals to logos 

in this argument using parallel construction when showing , how we perceive the world 

as it relates to us, how we perceive ourselves as the center of it all, and how we perceive 

our feelings, our thoughts to be “so immediate, urgent, and real.” Wallace also appeals 

to pathos in two ways first by drawing a connection between the inability to choose 

what to pay attention to, and suicide. Then buy telling an adjective loaded story, about 

grocery shopping after a long day of work, to make the reader feel both present and 

frustrated by the situation.  

Wallace later uses this story as a connection to his next claim by explaining how 

when we make a conscious choice of what to perceive it can make our lives feel more 

meaningful. Wallace then appeals to logos by introducing his final argument about how 

the only thing that is capital T true is that we get to decide how we're going to see the 

world. After introducing his final argument Wallace makes his next claim. In adult life 

“everybody worships.¨ Wallace uses parallel Construction in pairs when he goes on to 

reason that worshiping things like power or money aren't necessarily evil, but the danger 

in them is “that they’re unconscious.They are default settings.” 

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Because Wallace had introduced his final argument before making his claim 

about worship, he was able to talk about all the different things that people worship and 

use this as evidence that the only thing that can be capital T true is that we get to 

decide how we're going to see the world.Wallace uses two short sentence fragments to 

increase persuasion when he states that water is a metaphor for our simple awareness 

of the world around us. Near the very end of his speech Wallace connects his final 

argument to the beginning of his speech by answering the rhetorical question “what the 

hell is water?”.