Mini-Essay: 1 King uses the first half of his novel to describe his life up to the point of him becoming a writer. He uses many literary details to make it seem like a novel because it is in fact, a non-fiction book. King uses literary devices like appeal to humor, imagery, and exaggeration to make his non-fiction text seem like a novel. The most predominant device I saw King use in the section about his life leading up to his success was appeal to humor. There were many times in the book where I would actually laugh out loud, not just smile to myself. In one passage of the book, he describes how he printed off forty copies of The Pit and the Pendulum without knowing that he was breaking so many plagiarism and copyright laws. (pg. 48) Then, King sold the copies he printed off, which broke even more plagiarism and copyright laws. …show more content…
On the first level, there is the most common, vocabulary. Vocabulary is considered the “bread of writing,” it’s the most basic. (pg. 114) King states in the “Toolbox” that vocabulary is not about how much you have, but how you use it. (pg. 114) One of the worst things to do to your vocabulary is to “dress it up.”(pg. 117) Another important tool is grammar. According to King, grammar doesn’t always matter, and he addresses this by saying, “If your work consists only of fragments and floating clauses, The Grammar Police aren’t going to come and take you away.” (pg. 120) King tells the most writers do follow the rules of grammar because they’re scared of not doing well. (pg. 121) The third most important rule is: “The adverb is not your friend.” (pg. 124) King says adding on or two adverbs is fine, but once you add one or two, then a field of adverbs appear in your writing. (pg. 125) King really stresses not using adverbs so much, so I am going to say that minimal adverb usage is the most important of the rules. These rules given by King do not add up to what we have been taught in
King uses stylistic writing elements such as such as logos, ethos, and pathos and also figurative languages such as allusion, metaphor and symbolism is why it is continue to be studied. His emotion appeals are strong and effective and his sentence structures are complex and thoughtful.
what a good writing consists of. King manifests the idea of the more we read can equivalence to
Have you ever watched a movie and been dissatisfied, because it was not similar to its book? There are multiple movies that seem as if they are their own story, for they don't resemble their book at all. For example, “The Pit and the Pendulum.” by Edgar Allen Poe. He, himself would not approve of the film that follows his story. For one thing, the storyline was no where near to being like his book. Another reasoning is that he wrote based of one man not multiple people. And finally, he wouldn’t of approved of the art on the walls in the room with the pit and pendulum. These are the reasonings of why Poe would not appreciate the film.
This essay opens the minds of people to see that perfect writing is not always the perfect thing. Murray’s essay would interest almost every person who has been a student and taken an English class. Most
He used rhetorical techniques such as allusion, irony and metaphors. These were all ways of connecting to his reasoning’s by using an element of life or something that we are well aware of. He also used different types of appeals, which were pathos, logos and ethos. Each of these appeals had drawn us into his reading in different ways to connect to our emotions and the most affective was the common logic he brought and his credibility of being a well-experienced person in horror. Common logic is the best way to catch your readers attention because if they understand what you are proclaiming then they can grasp onto your argument. For Why We Crave Horror Movies, King gave both visible common logic and hidden. The hidden had to do with the psychological reasons to why we desire horror movies and how it can release our hidden, evil emotions that we normally keep inside of us. Also, it relieves us of stress to not be in the real world even if it is just for an hour or more. These hidden logic is more of a realization for the readers and come into sense these are the reasons why we truly do crave horror
King uses another periodic sentence when he says, “I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. ”(King 273) In this sentence he does not hold off the meaning of the sentence until the very end like in the previous one, but he arranges the sentence in such a way that is very effective. He shows that experiencing these things that have happened to him, and the fellow members of his race, is the only way to understand the true cruelty. Another time King uses syntax is when he says, “It gives the segregator a false sense
The Pit and the Pendulum and the Fall of the House of Usher are both dark and both have a gothic writing style to them. Edgar Allen Poe is known for his gothic writing style. In the Fall of the House of Usher he uses dark, gloomy, and suspenseful verbs. In the Pen and the Pendulum he uses suspense and a dark atmosphere.
The diction King's novels took on were not intentional in the beginning. King began writing novels with horror elements or completely based on the attention other horror novels such as Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby and Wlliam P. Blatty's The Exorcist had received after many of his naturalistic novels had been rejected (Keyishian 30). With this, King's novels changed from a romantic prose to direct rhythms and characterizations. King begins instruction in his book On Writing by instructing not to constrict to a manual of writing a certain way, but by simply writing and seeing what comes structure is able to out of it (McCrillis). The shift in his writing comes from many factors, but most are from letting the structure take on its own course; to not write as his vision sees it beforehand, but to let the wri...
Even though King uses pathos through his argument he connects to the reader. He also uses evaluating points to support his debate. When a writer uses a situation you can relate to, it makes you remember the situation and be able to learn from it. Though his argument his connects with the audience through emotion. By using the situation with his sister, he painted a picture that everyone in the audience could relate to. His argument was strong and made a powerful impact on the
...vely to lack attention given to them. King lures his readers in by using an
In 1958, when King was eleven years old, the family moved to Durham, Maine. This was where King discovered that he had something in common with his father. In the attic of his aunt and uncle’s garage he discovered an old trunk that contained a box of his father’s books, including some by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, and some of his father’s attempts as writing short stories. King’s teachers reported that one of his greatest passions was writing stories of his own, which he started doing at age six (Hoppenstand 8; Stephen King). Stephen King’s life has influenced his works and served as an important source of inspiration, which is evident in his education and early writing experiences, his pseudonym Richard Bachman, and his near-fatal acc...
Some teachers, when it comes to a child’s writing, do not want to make a child feel like what they wrote is wrong. Goldstein points out that teens today struggle more on college essays and in college because they are not taught correct grammar. Kathleen Sokolowski said that she went to Catholic school and grammar was a major element in her studies. I went to Catholic school as well and it was the same way. I knew others that were in public schools that did not learn grammar like I
They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (2nd ed.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
King owes his success to his ability to take what he says are “real fears” (The Stephen King Story, 47) and turn them into a horror story. When he says “real fears” they are things we have all thought of such as a monster under the bed or even a child kidnapping and he is making them a reality in his story. King looks at “horror fiction...as a metaphor” (46) for everything that goes wrong in our lives. His mind and writing seems to dwell in the depths of the American people’s fears and nightmares and this is what causes his writing to reach so many people and cause the terror he writes about to be instilled in his reader.
Rule number two exemplifies comma placement when dealing with three or more terms. Strunk and White say that in “a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last” (Strunk and White, 2). One example they use to demonstrate this is