Throughout Addario’s autobiography she uses rhetorical devices such as sentence structure and organization to help make her story more compelling or vivid. These same rhetorical devices can be transferred into my passion blog to make it more exciting.
On pages 116-117, Addario reveals the correspondence that she has with he one of her editors describing what she needs before she enters a war zone. Addario’s sentence structure is very visual and grabs the reader’s attention. The first thing that one can notice is the extended use of commas and parentheses. The commas help to show her nervousness about the situation as it is a stream of consciousness. Addario’s continued thoughts help her to cope with her new situation. One can see that Addario is nervous about this entire situation by reading what she writes in parentheses. Addario is unsure about what will be dangerous could be flying towards her, but is putting on a brave face saying that she is only afraid of heavy objects. That is why she is not too sure what will be coming toward her as she states “guess that would mean ceramic plates”. She also talks in a parenthetical phrase about how she is tired and just wants to get the planning over. Addario is stressed about the planning, and therefore, is ranting about wanting to have the event pass stating “sorry if this is too much info for you….get this planning over with…” The other important rhetorical device is organization. Addario writes this section by building each paragraph with more in detail than the next. She is explaining what she actually knows she needs to document about the trip. In a sense this is her realizing what she is about to photograph. The building of detail after detail show the stress she is experiencing.
While my blog is pretty care free, because reality television is made for relaxation. However, I can use sentence structure to highlight an idea. For example, a short sentence in the midst of long sentences can reflect and important idea and vice versa. I can organize my paragraphs in a similar fashion as Addario does to entice the reader. I can also organize my paragraph chronologically or topically to entertain the reader and have the reader focus on certain ideas. For example in my next post will discuss The Bachelor. I will divide the paragraphs based on topics, the Bachelor, the Bachelorette, and Bachelor in Paradise. My excitement for the show will be show in short sentences, while I will have longer sentences about things that I did not like that happened in the show. This will be similar to how Addario expressed her stress in a stream of consciousness.
Rhetorical devices help to show the reader what they are truly thinking about. They can show emotion and explain the environment people are experiencing, allowing the reader feel as though he were in conversation with the speaker in the book/blog.
kps5542 says
I enjoy how you focused more so on Addario’s writing strategies related to her style. As a writer, I often forget about the visual aspect of writing, and your blog post reminded me how important visual appeal truly is. The concept of using varying sentence lengths for emphasis is something I plan to utilize in my own blog. My only concern is if this is overused it may lead to an obvious pattern in your blog. It was also insightful that she uses structure to build detail. This blog post was very well written and made me view her writing in a different way.