Analysis Of ' On Keeping A Notebook ' By Joan Didion

Writers use pathos, ethos, and logos in their writing to appeal to their audience. Pathos is an appeal to emotions, ethos is an appeal to trust, and logos is an appeal to reasoning or logic. Frederick Douglass's, " What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" is about his views and the views of many slaves towards the Fourth of July. He uses ethos, pathos, and logos effectively to convey his central message.

This rhetorical device helps the reader understand what the author is feeling by conveying certain emotions. In Sullivan’s essay, the emotion that she was trying to convey was of how she wanted to be indolent and not go to a funeral because she did not see the importance of it. “I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Miss Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher” (Sullivan). Even though she did not want to go to the funeral, she ended up going. Twenty years later, the teacher’s mother still remembers the author’s name. This anecdote brings the emotion of homesickness and melancholy. Pathos can help the author connect with the reader by displaying the emotions they felt at that time of the

Pathos is used in order to link the essay with the reader’s emotions and ethos is used to show the writers moral character. For example, pathos is used when Kozol speaks to a student of a Bronx high school, “Think of it this way,” said a sixteen-year-old girl. “If people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone…how would they feel?...I think they’d be relieved.” (Kozol 205) This part of the essay really made me feel sad for this girl who lives in a society where she has grown up feeling like now one cares about her or others of her race.

“Writing it down is important to us…recording what we’ve done, in words, on paper, it’s got to be our way of telling ourselves that we mean something, that we matter. That the things we’ve done have made a difference.”

Pathos is to get peoples attention and draw them into to what they are reading to keep

Pathos appeals to the reader’s emotions by using emotional stories and imagery. Pathos strategies are often used to grab and hold the reader’s attention. Emotional or personal stories give the reader an opportunity to emotionally relate to the story, and allows them to be emotionally connected. An emotionally connected reader is more interested in the story that a reader who is not emotionally connected.

First let’s talk about how Sherman Alexie uses pathos to appeal to the reader’s emotions. In his writing when he is using this technique he says, “I read anything that had words and paragraphs. I read with equal parts joy and desperation. I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life.” (Alexie). This quote is successful because his word choice is helping to make the reader feel emotionally attached to the reasoning behind why he is doing what he is doing. Also, he says towards the end of his writing, “I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky.” (Alexie) He does a good job with his word choice in these short sentences. It makes the reader engaged in the writing because he is being assertive, and he knows what he wants. Which what he wants is the reader to understand his point that something needed to be done and he was going to be the one to do it. Both of these quotes that I have pulled from his text reaches the readers on an emotional level because he makes it seem that knowing how to read saved his life and now that he knows how to read and

Throughout the essay, Didion describes multiple random things that mean nothing to her, but were emotionally significant at the time she wrote them. Personally, I thought the tone used for both telling and talking about those memories seemed very nostalgic to her. Journals can be a way to remember who we were in the past, how we had thought and things we’ve done. Over time we forget things, and keeping a journal helps us relive both significant and insignificant events in our life that otherwise would have been blurred, or forgotten over the course of our lives.

While reading Joan Didion’s essay “On Going Home” one may be reminded of a sense of home and family. In this essay Didion recreates the feeling one gets when one visits a place from the past or while reminiscing about fond memories. This memory is marked by the reflective thought about the ability to be able to pass this same sense on to another. Didion’s “On Going Home” is like a flood of warm memories leaving you with a single reflective thought.

With the analysis of rhetorical strategies underway, I would like to discuss the presence of pathos in the speech. Sanger was a very passionate writer, and this allowed her to be absorbed into the paper. I noticed that, in Sanger’s speech, there were many emotionally loaded words. For example:

In the United States, there was once no peace and freedom, it had to fight for it. In “Speech to the Virginia Convention” Patrick Henry tries to persuade the (colonists) to fight for their freedom. In “President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat”, President George W. Bush speaks about how we must take down Saddam Hussein to help keep our freedom and peace with the world. Both speeches try to persuade people to fight for what they want. The speeches are rhetorically similar because they both have ethos, pathos, and loaded language.

In his letters, Elder Hansen writes using different types rhetorical elements. One element he uses often is pathos. According to Aristotle, pathos deals with emotions and feelings from the heart. Elder Hansen shares to his family and friends his personal experiences and how he has been changed by them. His writing also includes ethos, which helps the audience decide the credibility and character of the author. Many people may not understand why an

Pathos: It is the use of emotion and affect to persuade the audience. In this appeal, the author creates an emotional statement: “ an overworked single mother may find herself over stressed and fatigued at the end of the day, making

Didion’s article focuses on many subtopics that all surround the primary topic, “why keep a notebook?” She chooses to elaborate on her topic in a number of ways which create an interesting train of thought for the reader. “I was on Fire Island when I first made that sauerkraut, and it was raining, and we drank a lot of bourbon and ate the sauerkraut and went to bed at ten, and I listened to the rain and the Atlantic and felt safe. I made the sauerkraut again last night and it did not make me feel any safer, but that is, as they say, another story.” Didion’s essay ends with these two sentences, she explains what memory a sauerkraut recipe brings back.

Joan Didion, born in December of 1934, is an exceptional novelist and journalist within modern American society. Among her many successful works, The Year of Magical Thinking explores Didion’s first year as a widow after losing her husband, John Gregory Dunne, of forty years. Throughout this memoir, Didion focuses on the raw details and occurrences of not only Dunne’s death but their life together. Within an essay published in 1976 titled “Why I Write,” Didion explains that her reasons to write are linked to the pictures that are stuck in her head from past experiences. Taking those pictures, Didion builds a story, a meaning, around them and answers the questions they pose to the audience and to herself. Similarly, in her memoir dedicated