Vincent Lo
Miss Sorman
English 1A
22 October 2012
Critical Reading and Response on the Article “Letting Go” In the article “Letting Go” that was being published in The New Yorker, Atul Gawande addresses the issues regarding to the current medical care system that fails to meet the needs of the patients with terminal illness. Gawande points out that the patients want to spend more quality time with their family members and having some special last moments rather than struggling to stay alive when they know that the chances are thin. Knowing the time to let go was one of the crucial part of the art of dying which people nowadays has forgotten. Gawande argues that choosing the hospice care would sometimes be a better choice for the …show more content…

The result is that the people that have chosen hospice service leaped from 26 percent to 70 percent” (Gawande 142). The result shows that people were visiting the hospital lesser after they were introduced to hospice care. Gawande was trying to use the statistics to tell the readers that there were a lot of people that was in the same situation as they are, and they have chosen hospice care over hospital treatment after trying it. That implies that the hospice care would benefit the patients more than the hospital would. The overall structure of the Gawande’s article was well organized. He was able to convince his readers by giving a main idea of what he is trying to deliver through stories and then continue by some straight-forward points that he made. He then supports his arguments with examples to further enhance his point. The wording that he uses is simple yet it gives the readers some images that connect with their emotion. For example, “Sara would always arrive smiling, makeup on and bangs bobby-pinned out of her eyes. She’d find small things to laugh about, like the tubes that created strange protuberance under her dress” (Gawande 137). Gawande was trying to show that how sad it could be when a person is going through those surgery and treatment in order to get “fixed”. He would then use that emotion to bring up the point that is other solution to this problem which is the hospice care. I do think that the current medical care