Commentary #10

I love the way the style of this excerpt shows the narrator’s personality when they were young. While I could say the words being used to portray the whole experience as a child is not childlike. There is a sort of awareness of how things work that makes it sound more like an adult-like process. It creates a nice contrast between the facts that these children were just “playing” but they were doing so in a serious manner. Words like interference and territoriality are concepts that children of that age might utilize, because they’re taught them, but they wouldn’t necessarily understand their wide meaning.

There is a vividness to how the setting is laid out. While there isn’t much detail as to how the house looks or his cousins’ characteristics, but it keeps the focus on the interactions between authority and the children. The sentences themselves are long and winding, but they don’t continue for too long and give many details.

Commentary#9

Fraterrigo frames her narrative of images of women through mainstream media by giving us the background of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. She uses the main points of Friedan’s work in order to push the reader to think about the topic of the essay. While she doesn’t necessarily give her opinion of the perspective that is given by Friedan, she does give a sort of direct the way the reader sees the information.

The style isn’t too complicated, but is does sound of academia. While in the start of this intro, the information seems to be just matter-of-fact, but as it gets to the next paragraph, the reader feels that the Friedan did not present the whole picture. Fraterrigo is here to give a critique on the Feminine Mystique and offer more outside ideas that aren’t just mainstream media of the 50s and 60s. By using this style, it doesn’t necessarily say that Friedan is wrong, but tells the audience to look at more information and not to value the original text as “complete/comprehensive.”

Commentary #8

Focusing to guide writers on how to create a non-fiction essay, Bascom uses a lot of tools in order to give the reader a picture of what to do.  There is a lot of verbs that are active in a way that isn’t completely physical. When looking at what a writer has to do in order to take away the irrelevant material in their work, there is the words like deleting and chiseling away that makes these ideas more concrete. Imagery and choice of words really drive this guide in order to give the author’s thoughts on how to present experiences in ways that are valuable to the reader.

The language is accessible to most readers, and his use of first person makes the guide seem more interactive, in the sense that the author kind of addresses his readers in an informal way. The imagery and the point of view make this “inter-“ active because it gives different paths of information to get his point across.

Commentary #7

Again, Woolf here shows the audience her use of the stream of consciousness. There is a sort of smooth, if not quick, transition from each idea that comes from the character’s mind. As a reader of the full novel, there were times when this sort of technique made it difficult to understand the progression of the plot. Instead of a linear movement through time, the audience is muddles with the surges of thoughts from each character. However, it gives a more “comprehensive” look at the current moments that the character faces. Lily is painting while thinking about the differences between her and Mrs. Ramsay, and there is a sort of homosocial subtext going on within her mind. The audience gets another look at Mrs. Ramsay as a character and how she effects Lily.

The point of view is 3^rd person, but there isn’t much omniscience because the audience is only given the thoughts of the characters of the moment. The audience doesn’t see Carmichael’s ideas because they are entrenched in Lily’s mind and her doings. It focuses on the movement between characters, without letting others invade.

With the smoother transitions, Woolf has mastered her style in this book, compared to her earlier work.

Commonplace Post #8

“My own theory is that most personal essayists, because of a natural ability to extrapolate, do not struggle to find subjects to write about. Writer’s block is not their problem since their minds overflow with remembered experiences and related ideas. While a fiction writer may need to invent from scratch, adding and adding, the essayist usually needs to do the opposite, deleting and deleting. As a result, nonfiction creativity is best demonstrated by what has been left out. The essay is a figure locked in a too-large-lump of personal experience, and the good essayist chisels away all unnecessary material.

One helpful way to understand this principle of deletion is to think of the essayist looking through a viewfinder to limit the reader’s focus. The act of framing a selected portion of raw experience from the chronological mess we call “life” fundamentally limits the reader’s attention to a manageable time and place, excluding all events that are not integrally related. What appears in the written “picture,” like any good painting, has wholeness because the essayist was disciplined enough to remove everything else.”

Tim Bascom, Picturing the Personal Essay: a Visual Guide

Commonplace Post #7

“She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs. Ramsay. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr. Bankes’s glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr. Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. But why different, and how different? she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that–hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be–Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr. Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr. Bankes saying, “The vegetable salts are lost.” All this she would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the window, in pretence that she must go,–it was dawn, she could see the sun rising,–half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing, insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs. Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs. Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs. Ramsay listening; shaded lights and regular breathing.”

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Commonplace Post #6

“The sight filled the northern sky; the immensity of it was scarcely conceivable. As if from Heaven itself, great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled. Pale green and rose-pink, and as transparent as the most fragile fabric, and at the bottom edge a profound and fiery crimson like the fires of Hell, they swung and shimmered loosely with more grace than the most skillful dancer. Lyra thought she could even hear them: a vast distant whispering swish. In the evanescent delicacy she felt something as profound as she’d felt close to the bear. She was moved by it; it was so beautiful it was almost holy; she felt tears prick her eyes, and the tears splintered the light even further into prismatic rainbows. It wasn’t long before she found herself entering the same kind of trance as when she consulted the alethiometer. Perhaps, she thought calmly, whatever moves the alethiometer’s needle is making the Aurora glow too. It might even be Dust itself. She thought that without noticing that she’d thought it, and she soon forgot it, and only remembered it much later.

And as she gazed, the image of a city seemed to form itself behind the veils and streams of translucent color: towers and domes, honey-colored temples and colonnades, broad boulevards and sunlit parkland. Looking at it gave her a sense of vertigo, as if she were looking not up but down, and across a gulf so wide that nothing could ever pass over it. It was a whole universe away.”

Phillip Pullman, The Golden Compass

Commentary Post #6

First off, the style of this piece, I believe, reflects almost perfectly the writing that is consistent within Pullman’s novel, The Golden Compass. The story is told in third person omniscient. Although one would think that the story would benefit from being in the eyes of Lyra, the protagonist, the story is able to reach out and show different views of the tale.

The writing is quite linear and easy to follow. The details made within the novel are clear and very enjoyable to see. Within the section, there are some terms that I would consider jargon, such as Dust and Alethiometer. While the style of the tale puts mainly into the world and hardly gives the reader any information until it is brought up within the novel. Here, this can either make the reader feel lost or make them fully immersed within the narrative.

The language itself is simple to read and I would give it a low medium range of difficulty. The sentences themselves are easy to read, but the way the author strings together descriptions and the plot shows his expertise.

Commentary #5

The style of this piece from Alexie’s novel is very relaxed and informal. The use of first-person and its tone connect the audience with the narrator almost immediately when reading this piece. There is also a use of repetition that emphasizes his need for drawing and the way it helps him deal with certain issues he has.

When looking at what he is writing about, there is a sense of gravity in his words even when they are so matter of fact. He talks about the understandings between human beings, about the problems with race and poverty, and how he hopes his drawings will help him escape the cycle. These topics are heavy and yet the way he brings them up fit the character who is young and just wants to tell the story.

Commonplace Post #5

“I draw all the time.
I draw cartoons of my mother and father; my sister and grandmother; my best friend, Rowdy; and everybody else on the rez.
I draw because words are too unpredictable.
I draw because words are too limited.
If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese,or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning.
But when you draw a picture, everybody can understand it.
If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman,and child in the world can look at it and say, “That’s a flower.”
So I draw because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me.
I feel important with a pen in my hand. I feel like I might grow up to be somebody important. An artist. Maybe a famous artist. Maybe a rich artist.
That’s the only way I can become rich and famous.
Just take a look at the world. Almost all of the rich and famous brown people are artists. They’re singers and actors and writers and dancers and directors and poets.
So I draw because I feel like it might be my only real chance to escape the reservation.
I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.”

-Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian