A Drugstore In Winter Rhetorical Analysis

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I had trouble finding the right topic for my essay. I wanted to emulate Cynthia Ozick’s “A Drugstore in Winter” in how the essay focuses on memory and is a mosaic of experience. I love how Ozick’s essay spans her adolescence at PS-71 to adulthood after the death of her parents and her use of hupomnemata as reference points in her life, the books she loved reading as an access point to discuss memory. In a way that echoes Ozick’s form, I sought to combine pathos and logos as the driving forces of my essay: to offer a mediation on the idea of belonging through my own personal experiences while simultaneously providing a deep dive into memory. Just as Ozick does, I wanted to meander through my life, piecing together memories. I decided to use …show more content…

I remembered conversations that we had specifically about keeping secrets from our parents, and how we would laugh about “close calls.” I knew I wanted my essay to be about this teenage secret-keeping, but I didn’t want it to be about the secrets. I did not want to invoke the judgment of the reader on decisions I have made throughout my life, but wanted to look more macroscopically at the family dynamics at play. I kept returning to an idea we discussed in class: “being really, really vulnerable” but not confession. If it's just confessional, then you’re giving the situation without the story” (Class Notes). Since my writer’s voice was becoming distinctly diaristic, I decided to avoid becoming confessional by keeping the reader at arms length. This way, I could focus on the idea of family secret-keeping. This also gave birth to an interesting paradox of allowing myself to be honest and diaristic while simultaneously being decidedly closed off and reserved. I wanted to use the last line to emphasize this idea. After writing the refrain line, I knew that the essay would not be a tell-all, and the second line I wrote was the essay’s final line: “Reader, do you feel

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