Rhetorical Analysis Of It's Just Work By Annie Dillard

In Annie Dillard’s story The Deer at Providencia, she talks about her experiences with suffering in life. The message that Dillard is trying to convey is that nobody can escape suffering, so we have to learn to accept it as a part of life. The first example of this message is when Dillard sees the deer at Providencia for the last time, and she glances at the deer pityingly and says the Spanish equivalent of “poor little thing.” However, after that Dillard says that she “knew at the time it was a ridiculous thing to say (Dillard 44).” This proves that she acknowledges the suffering it is experiencing, but knows that it is futile to point it out, as suffering is inescapable- it is a part of life.

Dillard’s purpose is to inform the reader of how to develop a larger range of our vision in order to get new perspectives on how to live life. She introduces logos to get to ethos. Dillard uses many interesting facts like in “Fixed”, “The female will mate with and devour up to seven males”(Dillard 60) and “If a bee is heavy with honey, the wasp drinks by licking the tongue of her unfortunate victim”(Dillard 60). The facts prove that there are intricate details about everything. The authors desired outcome is to make people want to open their minds and look more abstractly in their lives.

Author, Annie Dillard, in her passage, “The Stunt Pilot,” explains how her attitude towards her understanding of art changed after meeting stunt pilot, David Rahm. Dillard’s purpose is to explain how meeting Rahm and seeing his performance transformed her, and helped her to understand what it means when work becomes art. She adopts a tone of awed appreciation in order to convey to her audience of highly literate adults how profoundly Rahm affected her. Dillard begins with a factual and objective style that sets the pace. Dillard introduces Rahm, and informs her audience that he “lived in Bellingham...a harbor town...in Haro Strait” while she lived “between the stints on the island.”

In “An American Childhood” Annie Dillard gives a glimpse into her childhood and growing up as a girl who liked playing sports and doing things typically boys would do. In this particular exert, the author talks about her experience of playing with her neighbors and throwing snowballs at passing cars. In the experience Dillard talks about one incident where, “a snowball hits the driver’s side windshield directly in the driver’s face.” (24) In the next few sentences the author gives you a feeling of adrenaline rush and excitement as the driver of the car stops and gets out and starts chasing the children.

The speaker Elizabeth Gilbert did a wonderful job of delivering her message through her down-to-earth, comical attitude, passion, and confidence is her words. Her message, just as I mentioned before, was directed towards artists about how society puts such massive pressure of artists of every kind, especially in the case that these artists become very successful, explaining how we should view artists and all other people as having their own genius, rather than labeling select people as brilliant or amazing. She expresses that is the world develops this new view, then maybe it will level the playing field, and relive the wight off of so many of our

Textual Analysis In the readings "An American Childhood" by Annie Dillard and "Always Running" by Luis Rodriguez, the authors and their essays are very similar, but at the same time different in their own respective ways. Both authors use an array of verbs to string sentences together as well as to keep the narrative moving. Both these authors create a fast-paced chase like sequence of sentences and verbs to keep their essays interesting as well as getting their perspective and points across. In Annie Dillard 's "An American Childhood" the author begins the story letting us readers get an understanding of the main character describing her almost as a tomboy, "Boys welcomed me at baseball, too, for I had, through enthusiastic practice, what was weirdly known as a boy 's arm.

Dillard includes a shift from inside the plane to back outside in the twenty-ninth paragraph and uses mundane diction choices. While flying in the plane was exhilarating, once they landed, Dillard and Rahm simply “climbed,” “walked,” and “wandered.” These mundate diction choices are used in order to emphasize how being inside the plane juxtaposed to being outside of it. Inside, life was amazing and breathtaking, but outside, everything was mundane and average. The audience can understand how Dillard’s view on life outside the plane had changed--she no longer was interested in it, and desired her new-found life in the sky.

In the fifth paragraph, Dillard describes Rahm’s appearance and juxtaposes that to vivid imagery. At the start of the show, Dillard was, “Idly paying...attention,” when she saw a “medium-sized, rugged man, dressed in brown leather, all begoggled…” who happened to be David Rahm. These mundane details describe Rahm as an average, ordinary man, who great things were not expected. By using mundane details, audience members understand how Dillard did not pay any extra attention to Rahm because he appeared to be average. However, once Rahm was in the plane, his actions demanded her attention.

“The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world,” Dillard states when describing the time period in which she began to outgrow many of her childhood fantasies. Dillard accounts that when she five, “growing up in Pittsburgh in 1950, I would not go to bed willingly because something came into my room.” However, Dillard kept her fear a private matter and refrained from involving her two year-old Amy, because, “she was innocent of evil.” Dillard goes into further detail about Amy, describing the innocence she displays while asleep as “charming”, “pleasant” and “serene.” Shortly thereafter, Dillard comes to the realization that the innocence Amy possesses protects her from fear.

A twelve year old boy a world away from his parents once wrote in a letter to his parents: “And I have nothing to comfort me, nor is there nothing to be gotten here but sickness and death.” This child was Richard Frethorne, and in “Letter to Father and Mother,” he communicates his desperation caused by the new world’s merciless environment to his parents to persuade them to send food and pay off his accumulated debts from the journey. He accomplishes this with deliberate word choice and allusions to the bible to appeal to ethos, pathos, and logos. Frethorne uses diction, imagery, and facts to create a letter to his parents which aims to garner sympathy for his state of life and to persuade them to send food and pay off his debts.

Annie Dillard's “Living Like Weasels” is a personal essay reflecting the author's interpretation of her first encounter with a wild weasel. From the very beginning, Dillard explains what it is that makes a weasel wild, saying that they, “[stalk] rabbits, mice, muskrats , and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcases home” (Dillard, line 2). She uses very violent and visceral imagery and almost exaggerates to the readers how savage they live. Dillard is very clear in mentioning that the bodies are ‘warm’ as the weasel ‘drags’ it home; although written so casually, this can strike the readers as disturbing being that it implies the weasel does not even wait for death to completely consume the body of the prey. She continues to offer a distant naturalistic description of the location where she met the weasel, “under every bush [a] muskrat hole or a beer can...fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks--in whose bare clay wild turtles lay eggs”