Many authors employ various stylistic elements, including language, narrative structure, tone, imagery, dialogue, and characterization, to craft compelling memoirs. Authors such as George Orwell, Frank McCourt, and Annie Dillard use these elements in their own style to reach the reader. Style is an author’s use of syntax and other literary devices to convey their voice to the reader. Each author uses style in their own way to create a clear message to the reader while also creating a unique and interesting story. Annie Dillard uses style to create a vivid and detailed setting in her memoir An American Childhood. Annie Dillard uses her style creatively along with imagery to allow the reader to picture the scene and setting vividly. Authors such …show more content…
It interested me especially for the totemic brown water stain on a sloping plaster wall. The stain looked like a square-rigged ship heaved over in a storm. I have been looking at this ship for many months. It was a painting, not a drawing; it had no lines, only forms awash, which rose faintly from the plaster and deepened slowly and dramatically as I watched the seas climb and the wind ride before anyone could furl the sails.”(Dillard, 126) Annie Dillard invites the reader on a walk up to her attic. The reader is vividly brought up with Dillard and almost feels as if they are in the attic looking at the stain. Dillard turns a water stain into an entire scene. Making the stain turn into a ship at sea with a crew and waves crashing into the ship. The way that Dillard turns a simple and mundane stain into an intense scene in the reader's mind is amazing. Dillard’s use of imagery and description almost guides the reader’s imagination to create a vivid and detailed …show more content…
What is the 'Standard' of the 'Standard'? What’s up, son,? Eugene went on crying and when Dad leaped from the bed and turned on the gaslight we saw the fleas, leaping, jumping, fastened to our flesh. We slapped at them and slapped, but they hopped from body to body, hopping, biting. We jumped from the bed, the twins crying, Mam moaning, Oh, Jesus, will we have no rest! ” (McCourt, 1) McCourt describes a night that his whole family had to sleep in the same bed in a small room. McCourt describes the room and uses imagery to describe how small the room actually is. As the reader, you almost feel cramped in with the family. McCourt then describes how there were fleas that caused everyone to jump up and McCourt’s style makes the reader feel as though they are in that bed amidst all the chaos. McCourt describes how everyone jumped up and the kids were crying and everyone was slapping themselves and freaking out. McCourt uses imagery to allow the reader to feel involved and almost a part of the family, as if they were there. Frank McCourt is able to use style and different literary devices to make the reader feel as if they were a part of the story. The reader is almost forced to become a part of McCourt’s
The author uses a lot of description when setting the scene, or writing how someone looks. He also uses a lot of color imagery within the chapters and writes in 3rd person narrative.
“ The horizon was the color of milk. Cold and fresh. Poured out among the bodies” (Zusak 175). The device is used in the evidence of the quote by using descriptives words that create a mental image. The text gives the reader that opportunity to use their senses when reading the story. “Somehow, between the sadness and loss, Max Vandenburg, who was now a teenager with hard hands, blackened eyes, and a sore tooth, was also a little disappointed” (Zusak 188). This quote demonstrates how the author uses descriptive words to create a mental image which gives the text more of an appeal to the reader's sense such as vision. “She could see his face now, in the tired light. His mouth was open and his skin was the color of eggshells. Whisker coated his jaw and chin, and his ears were hard and flat. He had a small but misshapen nose” (Zusak 201). The quotes allows the reader to visualize what the characters facial features looked like through the use of descriptive words. Imagery helps bring the story to life and to make the text more exciting. The reader's senses can be used to determine the observations that the author is making about its characters. The literary device changes the text by letting the reader interact with the text by using their observation skills. The author is using imagery by creating images that engages the reader to know exactly what's going on in the story which allows them to
Examining the formal qualities of Thomas Birch’s painting An American Ship in Distress was very interesting. This paper will analyze and illustrate what I saw in this particular piece of artwork. The paper will also discuss the art elements such as line, shape, color, texture, scale, and composition of the artwork.
In nature things often occur that parallel our way way of being. In this short excerpt, Annie Dillard portrays the amount of determination and stubbornness in weasels, which is much like our own. At the beginning Ms. Dillard reflects on the characteristics that make a weasel wild. She writes that the weasel “…[kills] more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home” (Dillard 1). She then moves on to the weasels instinct,and stubbornness, through an anecdote in which a naturalist found himself with a weasel stuck to his arm with one bite, and try as he might her could not “pry the tiny weasel” (Dillard 1) off his arm. The only way he was able to release himself was to “soak him[the weasel] off like a stubborn label”(Dillard
An authors style defines itself as the way in which the author expresses themselves throughout the piece of literature. They express themselves through their word choice, word order, rhythm, imagery, sentence structure, figurative language, and literary devices. Sandra Cisneros’, “The House on Mango Street”, is a short story encompassing the events and thoughts of an un-named child narrator as they describe their family’s living arrangement. Sandra uses a distinct type of style throughout her writing which fits the short story well. On the other hand, William Carlos Williams’, “The Use of Force”, is a short story about a doctor’s visit to an unusual patients home. The stories have their own distinctive style which is unique to each but, there
The poem is notable for Hayden's characteristically accurate evocation of imagery. Just like his other poems, Hayden’s imagery in this poem is very vivid. The reader is able to imagine or see these images in their inner minds. Thus, the diver “sank through easeful/azure/swiftly descended/free falling, weightless/plunged” he described the diver’s carefree attitude and relaxed attitude as he dove into the sea. Thrilled and enchanted by what he sees in the wrecked ship, he lingers for more than intended. When he was brought to the reality of the danger he was in, he, “...in languid/frenzy strove/began the measured
Her attention to the most miniscule detail and her grand explanations of spaces impacts her writing style and her reader’s reactions. This particularity is seen in this example: “I woke to a room of sunshine. A wispy-thin curtain veiled a multi paned sliding door of glass...The windows needed washing but slid easily apart and I stepped out onto a tilted balcony, a string mop on a hook to the left of me, and a half-missing board where I had planned to put my right foot. The breath went out of me...About 200 feet below was the sea… (151).” The authors account of this event could have been dull and simple as “There was a hole in the floor of the balcony”, but instead she chose to use detail and descriptors to engage the reader to imagine seeing the strange hotel room that almost turned her relaxing morning into a 200 foot
In addition to the use of colorful diction, Hardy employs detailed imagery. The phrase “Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the guilded gear” depicts fishes looking at the sunk Titanic and wondering what “this vaingloriousness” was doing under the sea. He also mentions in the third stanza how the “jewels in joy designed To ravish the sensuous mind” were all lost and covered by darkness. Using these detailed images, Hardy is portraying the contrasts of before the ship sunk and after.
Some of the most intriguing stories of today are about people’s adventures at sea and the thrill and treachery of living through its perilous storms and disasters. Two very popular selections about the sea and its terrors are The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger and “The Wreck of the Hesperus” by Henry Longfellow. Comparison between the two works determines that “The Wreck of the Hesperus” tells a more powerful sea-disaster story for several different reasons. The poem is more descriptive and suspenseful than The Perfect Storm, and it also plays on a very powerful tool to captivate the reader’s emotion. These key aspects combine to give the reader something tangible that allows them to relate to the story being told and affects them strongly.
Charles Yale Harrison’s “in the trenches” and mark twain's” two ways of seeing a river” are both autobiographical narratives that use descriptive language. In Harrison’s “in the trenches,” his brilliant use of sensory imagery lets the readers mind experience the treacherous and horrendous reality of war, with just the use of words. On the other hand, in twains “two ways of seeing a river,” the use of sensory imagery is carefully used to help the reader visualize the change in twains perception of the once “majestic river.” Both authors effortlessly utilize imagery to illustrate the realities of their topics. Harrison uses all the aspects of sensory imagery to display the life men are living in the trenches; meanwhile, in twains essay, he partially
The poems “Sea Rose” by H.D and “Vague Poem” by Elizabeth Bishop were both written by two women who took over the Victorian era. H.D’s works of writing were best known as experimental reflecting the themes of feminism and modernism from 1911-1961. While Bishop’s works possessed themes of longing to belong and grief. Both poems use imagery, which helps to make the poem more concrete for the reader. Using imagery helps to paint a picture with specific images, so we can understand it better and analyze it more. The poems “Sea Rose” and “Vague Poem” both use the metaphor of a rose to represent something that can harm you, even though it has beauty.
The opening paragraph of the story emphasizes the limitations of the individual’s vision of nature. From the beginning, the four characters in the dingy do not know “the colors of the sky,” but all of them know “the colors of the sea.” This opening strongly suggests the symbolic situations in which average peo...
Relief,” Millay used a similar form of imagery to describe the rain that resulted in the remembrance of the persona’s love: “…I miss him in the weeping of the rain…” (Millay, 3). This description of the rain not only helped better visualize the rain itself, but also emphasized the sorrowful and desolate undertone of the poem. Another exemplification of visual imagery utilized in Millay’s poem was used to illustrate the tides: “…I want him at the shrinking of the tide…” (Millay, 4). The retreating of the tides was easily concei...
Many important American writers came to prominence during the Jazz Age, but their commonalities often stopped there. From lyrical to sparse, many different styles can be seen among these authors, such as those of Henry James, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. One stylistic technique, stream of consciousness, was most associated with Joyce. Yet, Hemingway also used this technique with regularity and it is an important element in his war novel, A Farewell to Arms. This technique uses the interior monologue of a character to convey information, and thus the reader is allowed a more fluid picture of the true thoughts of the character, in this case, Lieutenant Frederick Henry. Also, the information contained in these stream of consciousness passages would not have been as effectively expressed in traditional prose style.
Through metaphors, the speaker proclaims of her longing to be one with the sea. As she notices The mermaids in the basement,(3) and frigates- in the upper floor,(5) it seems as though she is associating these particular daydreams with her house. She becomes entranced with these spectacles and starts to contemplate suicide.