The Santa Ana Wind
Linda Thomas and Joan Didion are both natives of Southern California and wrote about the Santa Ana, a wind that blows from northeast to Southern California every year. Didion, the author of The Santa Ana, mostly writes about the area where she was born in 1934. Thomas, the author of Brush Fire, was also born in Southern California. She has been writing poems, stories and essays for 25 years. Her writing has appeared in numerous print journals like American Poetry Review.
Both writers approach the topic of the Santa Ana winds very differently, although they both wish to inform different people about the effects of the winds. Each author has a different point of view and purpose than the other. Didion wanted to write her essay to show the force of darkness and the monster behind the Santa Ana Winds. Didion’s purpose for writing The Santa Ana is to inform readers about the wind, its danger, and its overall effects. Also, Didion wrote this didactic essay with the intention to help Easterners understand the Santa Ana more clearly. However, Thomas’s purpose was to show that hidden under this darkness is a beautiful and positive outcome. Brush Fire was written to shed a new light on the Santa Ana wind, and perhaps persuade newer residents of Southern California to have a more positive outlook on the winds.
Both authors used syntax to help convey their purpose. Thomas and Didion both used simple and complex sentence structures interchangeably in different parts of their essays to make the audience react differently. When Didion explains the “unnatural stillness” of Los Angeles, implying that the winds are coming, she follows a long, descriptive sentence about the winds with a simple, powerful sentence explaining h...
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... being depressed but she connects these events to the wind to emphasize that this wind really means more to these people than just being a seasonal phenomenon. In Brush Fire by Linda Thomas, she takes a different tack. Thomas uses less hyperboles and dramatizations and utilizes more similes and metaphors. Phrases such as, “like a locomotive” help the readers who do not necessarily know much about the intensity of the fire get a clearer picture of what is going on. Both authors use various aspects of rhetoric to portray their different views on the wind.
In Conclusion, Thomas’s positive view of the winds in Brush Fire and Didion’s negative view in The Santa Ana are very clearly contrasting. The essays are very similar, however, in writing styles and structure. Using various aspects of rhetoric, each author made her purpose very clear and supported her purpose.
In her tone, Didion remains clear, consistent, and vivid. Her choice of words remains simple as if to not alienate the readers of her essay. Her tone for the first half of the opening, primarily the first and second ...
“The Lamp at Noon” written by Sinclair Ross, it is about a couple who lives at the dusty and windy prairies during the Great Depression. The drought & the dust storm has taken has taken the couples happiness and changed their life. The other story by Sinclair Ross, “The Painted Door” is very similar to “The Lamp at Noon”, a couple living up on the mountains experiences a very severe snow storm, this causing the conflict on the couple due to feel of isolation. Setting is a crucial element to establish a conflict that could change the characters action, thoughts and words. “The Lamp at Noon” and “The Painted Door” is one of the greatest examples of them, if Ross used the settings that was not harsh these conflict would have never occurred. Sinclair Ross portray the psychological landscapes of his characters by mirroring location, time and weather with the characteristics of the characters.
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
A. “Hills Like White Elephants.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Gen. ed. -. Kelly J. Mays. 11th ed.
Mrs. Rayfield wrote a great article about the devastation left over after this massive fire. I found that her accounts were very detailed and had good pictures to go along with them. I decided to use this source in my essay because she also showed the good effect that the fire had on the city not only the bad. She had a complete different point of view.
In the passage of the Narrative by Fredrick Douglass, the author masterfully conveys two complimentary tones of liberation and fear. The tones transition through the use of diction and detail. The passage is written entirely in first person, since we are witnessing the struggles of Fredrick Douglass through his eyes. Through his diction, we are able to feel the triumph that comes with freedom, along with the hardships. Similarly, detail brings a picturesque view of his adversity.
...roblems Los Angeles residents are facing just because of these winds whereas Thomas’s purpose is to try to create a relatively good opinion of the winds amongst her audience which is somewhat opposite of Didion’s purpose. Thus, all these developments of their messages can only be derived through the syntax.
The plainest way one see how they diverge is in how each author approaches the destruction that the Santa Ana brings to Los Angeles when its winds begin to blow in early December. Thomas’ tone starts didactic, and informative, her writing’s syntax more mechanical than the opposing text. Thomas is describing the nuanced details of the storm itself, and the hills it dominates. She describes the “padre's staff”, a grass that “requires the heat of a flame to crack open their seed pods and prepare for germination”, the intermittent nature of chaparral foliage that “ranges from ground-level wildflowers that require a magnifying glass, to eight-foot scrub oak and sage bushes.” The reader is focused on these smaller details, and Thomas uses this strategy to pull the reader in, drag them through place where “ fire that can rush up a canyon like a locomotive, roaring and exploding brush as it rages”. She lets the reader see it all, what everything she’s just told them actually means when conglomerated. Didion, on the other hand, is not focusing on the natural setting of the Santa Ana, although the fire looms large in her text as well, but the human setting. Her tone is thus more emotionally based, more feeling flows through it, there is a dynamism to her voice. Instead of focusing on describing the hills, Didion writes about the emotion that flows through the city, the maid sulking, the baby fretting. As the texts goes on the collective anger builds, and does the sentence length and complexity. Didion uses her syntax to slowly focus in on situations of pent-up rage that are allowed a channel of release during the strange desert season that takes hold, speaking of a time when every booze party ends in a fight, husbands roam their homes with machetes, and prominent attorneys commit
The main idea or concept of Didion’s “The Los Angeles Notebook” is to portray how human behavior and thought is a result of mechanics. Didion describes the Santa Ana winds as the omnipotent force that pulls humans to their mechanical nature. Los Angeles residents feel the arrival of the “bad wind” and succumb to the paranoia. Didion pairs a story of indians committing suicide to escape the wind with descriptions of the ominous changes that occur in the atmosphere during a Santa Ana to establish a mood of foreboding. After painting a Santa Ana as a paranormal force, Didion concludes to explain the science behind its “supernatural influence” on LA residents. She states that in the case of a Santa Ana, science can prove folk wisdom. The Santa Ana appears as a hot dry wind and whenever one occurs, doctors report patients with frequent “headaches, nausea and allergies, about nervousness and depression” (Didion 3). The excessive amount of
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