Annie Dillard's “Terwilliger Bunts One”

Throughout a person’s lifetime, an individual will have encountered an array of people with different qualities that make up their personalities. In general, people who are characterized as strong-willed are the one who have the initiative and they are risk takers. Also, they deviate from normalcy by looking for something new, different, or other ways of doing things because of the tedious situations they wound up in. As once Philosopher David Hume stated two hundred and fifty years ago that unlike those who deviate from the world of normalcy and clichés, most of the people go on with their lives in a “dogmatic slumber… so ensnared in conventional notions of just about everything that we don’t see anything; we just rehearse what we’ve been told is there” (Rosenwasser 4). In the anecdotal piece “Terwilliger Bunts One”, Annie Dillard has expressed her feelings and emotions towards her mother. Writing from the first person point of view, Annie Dillard also explains to her audience the attitude her mother took through many different circumstances and anecdotes that Dillard revealed thus admiring the personality of her mother as a child. By mentioning the qualities that her mother possesses, she is putting the spotlight on the impact her mother has made on her life using her parenting philosophy. The first parenting philosophy Dillard’s mother has taught her is to be very expressive in everything using surprising and strange-sounding words as part of the observation to other people. As Dillard recalls in her story, it happened when her mother heard the announcer on the radio cried out “Terwilliger Bunts one” and she started using this phrase as part of her “surprising string of syllables… for the next seven or eight years” (Dillard). ...

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...of everyone else’s opinion on that matter.

The main idea of the essay is to demonstrate the different ways in how Annie Dillard, the speaker, thinks and admires her mother’s personality and her qualities. This essay is not unusual because every daughter feels admiration and Proudness toward their mothers, even if they express their feelings in many different ways. As the speaker says, she takes pleasure in describing her exceptional mother and is proud of the lessons her mother taught her. The style of some mother’s uses to teach their kids is always in the beginning of their lives which lead them to have success or failure.

Works Cited

Roberts, Tammy, el al. The Broadview Anthology of Expository Prose. Broadview Press. 2002 Print.

Rosenwasser, David, el al. Writing Analytically with Readings. Thomson Nelson Press. 2003 Print.