Literary Techniques Used In 'Little Things' By Raymond Carver

Writing About Writing

A person packing his suitcase; a woman yelling at a man; a baby crying. It was “that day the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water.” The bare facts used in the short story “Little Things” by Raymond Carver in his opening paragraphs with dull imagery, emotional diction and dramatized ideas provide evidence that this piece is an example of excellent writing.

The opening of this story fulfills Trimble’s checklist of writing well. It used certain ways to accomplish that goal. The first one was to have the directness of approach as Trimble mentions “an essay, like a house, can be entered by the front door or the back door.” This piece of writing used a front door approach where the writer’s ideas were

However, the way he dramatizes his ideas is spectacular. The dark imagery was used throughout his story to create foreboding tone. Furthermore, he kept track of his sentence lengths. He tried to use shorter words so that the story looks appealing and easy to read without having a dictionary nearby. He used long sentences instead of short sentences, and also he did not follow the traditional scheme of writing one opening paragraph with three body and one closing paragraphs. Instead, he broke up his story into many small ones or two line paragraphs and segmented his story correctly. And to put an icing on the cake, his essay used dramatic plotting strategy in which he sprinkled his ideas in such a way where the reader can experience what is going on in the story rather than just reading it from a third perspective. He stated a problem where everything is gloomy and dark and then develop his story by using dramatic tension and then resolves the situation. In his conclusion, he did not enforce his idea rather he let it open ended for the readers to imagine and draw their conclusions because after all readers are ones in the first place who are not just reading but experiencing the