TOW #6 - "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris (Written Text)

          David Sedaris, nominated for three Grammy Awards, writes an essay, “Me Talk Pretty One Day” about his experience in a school in Paris with the hopes of learning French. His teacher always threw insults and ridiculed all the little things her students said, picking apart their answers and leaving them sputtering for a response with their limited vocabulary when she somehow turns it around on them. For Sedaris, he originally believes his teacher to simply be out to get every single one of them, boiling with some sort of unreasonable hatred that led some of her students to believe they just were not good enough for learning the language at all. He soon realizes, and thus wants to share with all other students who have had a seemingly terrifying teacher in the past, or even the present, that her method of teaching, although challenging, also helped him learn things before he even realized it. Her nitpicking had led him to study much longer than required and put in so much effort that he began to actively learn the language himself rather than from the perspective of another.

           Sedaris’s diction is one of the devices he uses effectively to convey this message. His referral to the teacher’s various actions as “accusing” or as an “attack” (Sedaris 220) helps to convince the reader that he believes her to be a vicious and terrifying woman who aims only to harm her students, especially when he begins to share how his fear, along with other students, began to seep into their everyday actions. The fact that he still refers to her insults as “abuse” (Sedaris 222) even at the end of the essay would hopefully leave the reader with the impression that yes, she is still merciless, but he now takes the abuse in stride because he knows it is what helps him strive to learn at a much more effective pace than if his teacher were to coax him gently through baby sets without much fear of failure. Had he been cushioned with every fall, he never would have learned to efficiently survive on his own in the “sink or swim” (Sedaris 219) course. I believe the way in which he applied this approach of creating his moral of the story serves its purpose surprisingly well, and the responses it managed to pull from me occurred before I even realized it.

TOW #5 - "Professions For Women" by Virginia Woolf (Written Text)

             In a speech delivered to the Women’s Service League by Virginia Woolf, a novelist and critic who has provided psychological insight through her works in the past, she speaks to the group with the intention of convincing members to share their experiences regarding joining new fields of works that were exclusive to men. By sharing their experiences, she hopes that it would aid in gradually destroying mental obstacles that women face constantly since many would soon begin to assist each other in getting through what may become common struggles among them. Through this method, she wants women to find more comfort in their chosen places in society and less tentativeness, and she starts off the idea with experiences of her own as a woman writer.

            With the objective to persuade, Woolf starts off the speech by discrediting herself as a completely reliable source for a look into the struggles of women. In the very first paragraph, she states, “My profession is literature; and in that profession there are fewer experiences for women than in any other, with the exception of the stage--fewer, I mean, that are peculiar to women. For the road was cut many years ago--by Fanny Burney by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George Eliot--many famous women, and many more unknown and forgotten, have been before me, making the path smooth, and regulating my steps. Thus, when I came to write, there were very few material obstacles in my way” (Woolf 525). By getting this point across and establishing it in the very beginning, Woolf uses the organization of her text that way in order to return to this point later in her speech. If she is able to make the audience believe that her profession is a more lenient one towards women, then she is able to more properly convince them when she asks them to try comparing her supposedly easygoing field of work to the more underdeveloped fields in which women are just starting to get a feel for things within.

            Woolf also alludes to a poem by Coventry Patmore called “The Angel in the House” in order to bring the concept of an idea into perspective for those who may not understand. The poem itself speaks about the ideal image of a woman in the form of the Angel, and Woolf uses Her in the form of her first experience. While writing a review, she claims to have been haunted by a phantom, the Angel, and in order to escape Her whispers of being an ideal and pure, Woolf kills her. “Had I not killed her,” Woolf insisted, “she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own” (Woolf 526). The Angel, also being a symbol for the traditional expectations of women, is the first obstacle Woolf revealed to have hopefully overcome in her career. Her allusion helps the audience understand the situation she speaks of, being pressed down by gender roles, much more easily, and they can more quickly relate as, during their time, it was only more recent in their perspective that women were starting to be allowed in all fields of work. This would help coax other women into sharing their experiences as well if they have a sense of familiarity in the community and can believe that their knowledge will also be relatable as well as useful among their group.

            Finally, Woolf uses parallelism between the experiences of men and women while writing to further her point. While this second professional experience becomes more specific to writers, it still carries the overall idea she tries to convey. She confesses that a writer’s “chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible”. She describes that ideal state of mind, but the only pronoun used in the description consists of “He”. She then moves on to acknowledge that, feigning a hypothesis that ‘she’ could be interchangeable with ‘he’ in that description since all writers are supposedly the same, but instead she asks the audience to imagine a girl writing in that unconscious-like state. “Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men,” Woolf explained, “The line had raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away… And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was a foam of confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream” (Woolf 527-528). This use of contrasting the girl’s erratic writing process with the much smoother writing process of the man, Woolf is able to emphasize the extent to which a man’s expectation, the later explained dashing against the rock, inhibits the abilities of women. With this emphasis, Woolf can show that she knows what it is like to be stopped from expressing oneself based on what outside influences may think, the outside influence in this case being men, and is able to possibly evoke a sense of empathy in her audience who would most likely know what it is like being in that position. The mutual understanding helps to possibly achieve Woolf’s goal in convincing her audience to begin sharing their experiences with one another in order to solve these issues collectively as a whole and overcome them together.

            Overall, by using these different devices, it would seem highly likely for Woolf to have garnered the desired effect with her audience, and I feel as though she was very clever in expressing her ideas and intentions through her speech.

Tow #4 - "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls (IRB)

     With a memoir of her past, Jeannette Walls writes The Glass Castle to motivate others into working to achieve their dreams even if they grew up with a rough childhood. The idea of a successfully well-known author being brought up from next to nothing serves to inspire others into striving for their own goals. The first half of Walls’s memoir consists of her early years from three to ten. The book is organized into chronological snap shots of Walls’s life, and the reader learns about the family’s not-so-perfect dynamics as well as the different places they hopped as a result of bill collectors and other legal issues since they have little to no money. They are often left eating very little food until the few opportunities arise in which there are items to eat, but nothing is ever set to last, and they soon move on yet again to the next town. Although almost anyone with past struggles could look to this book as a source of inspiration, those with more extreme problems, such as poverty, may feel the weight of this book the most.

     Walls uses colloquialism in her memoir for credibility. In many instances, Walls recounts her memories through her child-self’s eyes, and she often echoes the insults her father or others used most likely because she had no real knowledge of what they actually meant at the time. For example, “the Owl Club had a bar where groups of men with sunburned necks huddled together over beers and cigarettes. They all knew Dad, and whenever he walked in, they insulted him in a loud funny way that was meant to be friendly. ‘This joint must be going to hell in a handbasket if they’re letting in sorry-ass characters like you!’ they’d shout” (Walls 55). Like most children, Walls freely repeats words that she had heard around her and, unlike most, she is rarely, if ever, reprimanded for it. This embraces the reality of her skewed childhood with the fact that vulgar language was not as heavily restricted as many more middle-class families would expect despite the good manners the children display towards most adults. It makes the reader feel less skeptical of the bibliography if the more unappealing sides of the family are not obviously avoided for the sake of a more positive image, and they will be more likely to feel motivated by Walls if they find it easier to believe said bibliography. By using this technique, I feel as though she successfully managed to generate that sort of effect for her audience in order to reach her end goal.