Literary Analysis Of Jim Brandenburg's 'Northwoods Journal'

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The “Northwoods Journal”, is about Jim Brandenburg’s quest that takes place in Ely, Minnesota. Brandenburg wanted to challenge himself by taking one photo every day for 90 days. He will not have a second chance to change his F/stop or shutter speed to get the photograph correct. In the “Northwoods Journal”, he has many strong paragraphs, but the one that stood out to me was paragraph three. Brandenburg uses three writing strategies, descriptive words, sentence variety, and prepositions, to create a strong paragraph and engage an audience.
Throughout the “Northwoods Journal” Brandenburg uses descriptive words. Descriptive words help the author paint a picture for readers to visualize while reading. The reason why paragraph three stood out to me was because of the descriptive words Brandenburg uses. The first descriptive word Brandenburg uses is ‘quest’. The example from the journal is “Quest was both …show more content…

In paragraph three, prepositions are being used. Prepositions are used to introduce information to the reader where something took place, when or why something took place, and general descriptive words. Examples of preposition phrases being used in the paragraph are outside, and to. An example would be “Rigid in that once engaged, the constraints I had chosen would force me to examine myself and my art in a manner I 'd never before attempted”. ‘To’ is the preposition of this sentence. After ‘to’ is ‘examine’, Brandenburg wanted to examine himself through the quest. This explains why he decided to do this. Outside is another preposition phrase Brandenburg uses. “The wild and isolated place in which I live, outside the small, end-of-the-road town of Ely, Minnesota, would never look the same to me”. This sentence he is explaining to his audience where he lives. Brandenburg live just outside a small town. Brandenburg used prepositions to tell his readers where his quest took place and why he was doing

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