Syd Mattord AP Lang 4th hr. Rhetorical Analysis “What Is Snow Like?” Brian Doyle’s essay “What Is Snow Like?” allows his audience to see snow through the eyes of the experienced. Doyle’s anecdotes, imagery, and varying sentence lengths allow us to interpret the physical and emotional transformation of snow. Throughout Doyle’s essay, there is the prominent use of anecdotes, allowing the audience to connect with his piece, whether or/ not they have seen snow. His opening: “I met a small girl who told me she had never seen snow.” sets a rhetorical situation. Doyle’s use of a rhetorical situation allows the audience to read from the point of view of a young and curious mind while also presenting his purpose, “snow is inarguable” …show more content…
Doyle captures the beauty of snow throughout its physical transformations. He humanizes snow throughout the text using the word female in his sentence “Snow is like when female cottonwood trees let go of vast gentle quantities of fluffy seed pods all at once in spring.'' We often connect the adjective “female” to living beings; by including this in his text he creates the image of snow in a life-like approach. His word choice is important in this sentence, allowing us to witness the movement of snow without being in its vicinity. His mention of cottonwood seed pods provides an impression for those who have yet to experience snow, assuming the audience has seen cottonwood during warm seasons. Doyle promulgates a description allowing for deeper analysis of snow; “Snow starts white and then gets grayer and browner and sometimes black as if it’s rotted, which in a real sense it does,” creates an image in our head that begins to form a life-like cycle of snow, you may compare it to metamorphosis, a physical transformation occurring in nature. The audience can then conceptualize snow and its traits, seeing they have never experienced it firsthand. His description deepens the image his audience has formed of snow throughout his article. Initially, Doyle aims to have his audience picture the physical transformation of snow, even when not in its
"Then there was nothing but snow; snow on the road, snow kicking up from the chains, snow on the trees, snow in the sky, and our trail in the snow." (Wolff) " Because the freezing point is 32 above zero, it meant that there were 107 degrees of frost. The dog had learned about fire, and it wanted fire." (London)
So that SNOW came along.” In fact, I think that the elements listed represent groups of people from Coyote’s reserve that once recognized her before she drastically changed herself in Toronto. This powerful last example of repetition also has the ability to capture the reader’s attention to think and interpret these elements in a figurative way, which ultimately ties back to the author’s message about being an Indigenous
The subject matter of this painting is a bare, open landscape that features a dull sky, fresh layers of ice and snow, and a frozen river leading to an abandoned building. These descriptions resemble winter as a period of peace, silence, and loneliness. In 1912-1913, childhood memories from numerous winters influenced George Luks
Kim articulates a metaphor through the motif of snow as seen in the quote: “You see, before he came downhere, it never snowed. And afterwards, it did…” Kim's reflection on Edward's influence on the weather is ametaphor for his impact on the community, demonstrating her acceptance for his uniqueness through a positiveoutlook on his presence. Whilst the majority of society eventually rejected him, a scarce few were able to ignoreexterior appearances and identify the value in Edward's interior beauty. Shelley and Burton emphasise thetheme of isolation with correlation to acceptance, beauty, and perception, employing a variety of languagefeatures to effectively convey these concepts.
Here, this quote presents a vivid description of a winter night and the narrator's experience of being in a snowy landscape. The focus is on the winter night, the real snow, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations. The emphasis on the winter setting creates a sense of coldness, emptiness, and desolation. Just as Nick feels empty after the loss of Gatsby. Winter is often associated with barrenness, as the landscape loses its vibrant colors and is covered in a blanket of white
She mistakes snow for nuclear fallout, having never seen it before, and is very relieved after her teacher reassures her. Julia Alvarez uses the setting in “Snow” to illustrate a theme which shows that the hardships of war and immigration are everyday struggles. Alverez uses the setting of New York City because it is a large and unpredictable environment, which helps enforce the theme that the hardships of war and immigration are everyday struggles. New York City is one of the largest and most well-known cities in the world, which also makes it somewhat intimidating to outsiders. Moving anywhere is a hard change of its own, but moving
“Let It Snow” is a window into the realities of a dysfunctional yet somewhat functional family. David Sedaris discusses a specific incident in his childhood in which he honestly and fairly exposes the way it can be while living in one such family. He illustrates the dysfunction of the mother, but yet shows the coherence and combined, impromptu, yet necessary functionality of his siblings and himself. His article is based on his experience with an extended snow day.
Often in literature, authors employ the use of a symbol to artistically reveal a message. In her novel Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton utilizes numerous symbols to subtly illuminate to her readers the complex relationship between Ethan and the world around him and to attach a deeper meaning to the work as a whole. Perhaps the most enlightening symbol found in Wharton’s tale of a love that could never be is that of winter. In many works of literature, a wintertime setting evokes a sense of perpetual coldness (both in temperature and in reference to a lack of affection or warmth of feeling) and it inherently provokes associations of death, misery, and isolation. These ideas are most certainly applicable to the melancholy atmosphere that the wintertime
In addition to her being tough, young Annie Dillard illustrates herself as a creative child with an imaginative mind. She uses figurative language, such as simile, to compare the tire tracks as “crenellated castle walls” (❡ 5), and goes into describing the ideal snowball: “a perfect iceball, from perfectly white snow, perfectly spherical, and squeezed perfectly translucent…” (❡ 6). The purpose of using these rhetorical strategies is to set a setting of the story and give a background of the
In the novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, The author, David Guterson, characterizes the main character by using imagery, and word choice. He not only evaluates the character, Kabuo Miyamoto, but also accentuates the importance of the setting. He does this by comparing the outside and inside by inferring that they are completely different, while also using a religious touch. David Guterson, the author, Uses Imagery and word choice to help characterize and understand the main character. In the first paragraph Guterson decides to use very descriptive imagery words.
However, he understands that he has to face the real reason to why they are bent, which shows how Frost is trying to express that reality must be faced. The reason that the birches are bent is because of the winter storms that makes them coated with heavy snow causing them to grow in the bent-over position (Andrews 236). In the following lines, “loaded with ice in sunny winter morning” (6) Frost uses an oxymoron to show how imagination corresponds to the truth. Frost uses “sunny,” to describe the winter, which creates a powerful connotation. The season of winter is described as a harsh environment however here Frost uses sunny to describe this morning, which helps create this bright imagery.
The theme elucidated throughout Cofers person story advocates nothing stays as just white snow. The quote “ Looking up at the light I could see the
One place that a reader can pull a meaning out of is “the snow was melting” (Carver 1) as well as “where it was getting dark” (Carver 1). The diction in these segments is simple, but one can look at the contrast between the snow, which is white and pure, and dark, which is mysterious and possibly painful. The word choice in this piece help to achieve an aggressive, but still protective tone. The sentence structure is also simple and not well-formed, and
Firstly, Frost used metaphor in the very first fifteen lines of a boy swinging the birch of tree limbs to show what nature does. He also describes the tree limbs in the winter as he says “Loaded with ice” that cracks and “crazes their enamel” with imagery and the usage of the enamel is metaphoric. The snow metaphorically is compared to “broken glass” which swept away. Frost returns his metaphor in the lines 41 and 59 of a person who’s being a "swinger of birches" as someone who uses creative imagination. Secondly, he uses personification which is also given to birches which “never right themselves” and “trailing their leaves on the ground.”
In “Bushed” by Earle Birney and “Winter Evening” by Archibald Lampman, both Canadian authors express the same opinion on nature: although nature is extremely beautiful, it is also uncontrollable and potentially dangerous. In both poems, the authors use descriptive imagery in the same way to depict the beauty and power of nature; however, the authors use different methods to communicate their opinion on the negative face of nature: Birney makes the danger of nature apparent at the beginning of the poem while Lampman is more sudden and conveys the sinister side of nature near the end of the poem. Both authors use imagery to describe their opinion that nature is extremely beautiful and powerful. In “Bushed”, Birney depicts the mountain where