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June 27th starts out with the “warmth of a full-summer day”, yet a brutal murder interrupts this ordinary morning (144). An innocent woman is killed. Her life is stolen in order to satisfy one town’s tradition. Family, friends, and enemies responsible for her death had enough experience with this practice that they “only half listened to the directions” (146). However, as the people anxiously await the end of this annual, ritualistic event known as the lottery, no one expresses a single opinion about the behavior. In the short story “The Lottery” the author Shirley Jackson utilizes several propaganda techniques in order to show that people need to think for themselves. To begin with, exigency, one of the main techniques of propaganda Jackson uses shows that when people don’t have enough time to think they blindly follow the crowd. From the beginning, the villagers rush the lottery and expect it to last