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 the short story, “Ashes for the Wind,” the main characters, Juan and Carmen, are faced with having their home, along with their community destroyed. The son of Simon Arevalo is confronted with the choice to burn down his community or to do his job, commissioned by the mayor. By staying in the burning house Juan and Carmen do their duty of protecting their child by giving them a quick death. Arevalo does his duty by allowing the burning of the houses by the police. Doing their duties, however, result in many wrongs done, the destruction of a community, and the deaths of an entire family.
No two people are truly the same, therefore creating a mass difference in outlooks when experiencing things. This is seen in the writings of authors Linda Thomas and Joan Didion in their separate essays, Brush Fire and The Santa Ana. Theses essays revolve around the same experience both authors share of the Santa Ana wildfire in southern California, but in different perspective. In Brush Fire, Linda Thomas gives the reader a more beautiful insight on wildfires while Joan Didion has a more serious and disheartening perspective on them, which each author paints in their own way.
The audience for whom those works were written for explains a great deal about the syntax and the diction, and as stated in Dynamic Argument, provides “different strokes for different folks” (Lamm and Everett 11). When Ron Reagan was delivering his remarks to the Democratic National Convention, he took into account that he needed to paint a picture for his audience “while still doing justice to the incredible science involve [involved]” (qtd in Lamm and Everett 428). The fact that he was trying to convince his audience to vote for embryonic stem-cell research showed that he needed to explain exactly how the procedure worked. His story about the thirteen-year-old young woma...
“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
Didion paints uneasy and somber images when describing the Santa Ana winds. “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air… some unnatural stillness, some tension,” starts the essay off with the image of Los Angeles people in a sense of stillness or tense. She further adds, “Blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66… we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night,” propagating the uneasy and stark image of Los Angeles. “The baby frets. The maid sulks,” she adds, giving a depressing view into the effects of the Santa Ana winds on people. Didion, in an attempt to show the craziness associated with the Santa Ana winds, points out the Indians who throw themselves into the sea when bad winds came. At any rate, Didion attempts to show the negative effects of the Santa Ana winds through images of stillness, uneasiness, and sobriety.
A. “Hills Like White Elephants.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Gen. ed. -. Kelly J. Mays. 11th ed.
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
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.
If we compare William Faulkner's two short stories, 'A Rose for Emily' and 'Barn Burning', he structures the plots of these two stories differently. However, both of the stories note the effect of a father¡¦s teaching, and in both the protagonists Miss Emily and Sarty make their own decisions about their lives. The stories present major idea through symbolism that includes strong metaphorical meaning. Both stories affect my thinking of life.
People always tell you to listen to your gut. However, all goes wrong for the poor character in Jack London’s (1876-1916) To Build a Fire when he wants to trust his gut. In the story, a mountain man explains to him how dangerous it is to venture out alone in incredibly freezing circumstances. Being the confident man that he is, he did not listen to the advice. It soon turns into a story of a man’s lonely road to try to survive. He finds a silent companion that cannot seem to help him. He then falls into a soft spot and gets wet to the knees. He knew he was in danger and he had to get a fire together fast. However, more bad luck came his way when we were building a fire and snow fell on it. He then had to hurry to build a new one, however it was to no avail. His fingers were to cold to rebuild a fire, so there was nothing that he could do. There are three reasons why the theme that nature is more powerful that sometimes assumed works so well in Jack London’s To Build a Fire.
The forces of nature not only shape the world around us, they also wriggle into our minds. In their essays, Brush Fire and The Santa Ana Winds, Didion and Thomas describe the indomitable power of the Santa Ana phenomenon, a time when warm dry winds breathe flame into the hills surrounding the city of angels. Much like certain chaparral of the southern California Hills the texts spring from the same root - both texts speak to the immeasurable and awesome power of this meteorological event, sharing similarities in vivid diction and, at times, imagery. In spite of these surface level parallels, however, these two texts branch off away from each other when it comes to the purpose, tone, syntax - both authors have vastly different messages to
Faulkner's style may give you trouble at first because of (1) his use of long, convoluted, and sometimes ungrammatical sentences, such as the one just quoted; (2) his repetitiveness (for example, the word "bleak" in the sentence just quoted); and (3) his use of oxymorons, that is, combinations of contradictory or incongruous words (for example, "frictionsmooth," "slow and ponderous gallop," "cheerful, testy voice"). People who dislike Faulkner see this style as careless. Yet Faulkner rewrote and revised Light in August many times to get the final book exactly the way he wanted it. His style is a product of thoughtful deliberation, not of haste. Editors sometimes misunderstood Faulkner's intentions and made what they thought were minor changes. Recently scholars have prepared an edition of Light in August that restores the author's original text as exactly as possible. This Book Note is based on that Library of America edition (1985), edited by Noel Polk and Joseph Blotner.
Judith Wright is a respected Australian poet is also known as a conservationist and protester. Her poetry has captured the most amazing imagery of Australian Culture. For Australian students to understand their own culture and history it is necessary to study the best poetry and Judith Wright’s poetry is definitely some of the best.