In “Why Not?”, author Catherine Norman shows the personal value she sees in taking photographs, helping her to remember times when her brain no longer can. She uses personification, metaphor and simile to show the reader this.
In the quote “The sun-soaked grass, the tiny blades dancing in their sparkling dew dresses”, she uses personification to say that the blades of grass are literally dancing, and sparkling, showing the dazzling beauty she sees when looking at them and highlighting how pretty she thinks the scene is, thus giving a reason as to why she wants to keep a photograph of it.
Further to this, when she says “I’d tell him that this tuesday morning is sitting in my pocket now, safe from time”, the metaphor that the morning itself is sitting in her pocket, instead of just a picture is used to illustrate the importance of taking that photo. She feels as if she has actually captured the pretty scene as shown before and put it away for safe keeping.
Simile is used in the quote “I won’t have to grasp frantically at my memories as they fall away like sand in an hourglass”, comparing the loss of memories in dementia or alzheimers to sand falling away in an hourglass. The inclusion of this is used by the author to show why she takes the photographs, so that she can remember things when her mind can’t.
All of these language features, and many more, are used within this piece to show the author’s feelings towards photo’s; that she will take them to hold onto and save the magic of the moment for when she gets old and can no longer remember it herself.
In Exposure by Jane Newett, language features such as assonance and rhyme, metaphor and personification are used to show her obscure perspective of a group of musicians going to an extreme location to perform and be photographed.
With the quote “Polyprop tops were stuck with sweat”, rhyme – polyprop tops – and assonance – stuck with sweat are used to create a fun sentence with the purpose of showing how extreme the environment the musicians are in really is. Polyprop tops are used for intensive outdoor use in the cold, and their inclusion on the musicians means they must be somewhere intensive. Stuck with sweat shows that the musicians have been excersizing to reach their location, proving that is extreme.
“The conductor shed his and was lashed by the whip of snow-crossed air” follows up this quote. It says that the conductor has shed his aforementioned polyprop top and is being metaphorically ‘lashed’ by ‘snow-crossed wind’. This inclusion shows the brutality fo the environment, that he is actually being lashed, a form of punishment, by the weather, and the snow-crossed wind shows that they are somewhere cold and possibly alpine, an environment know for it’s unrelenting harshness.
“songs of violins flew as the camera swooped” uses personification, saying that the camera is actually swooping around the air, photographing the musicians. The word swooped could be insinuating that the the camera is actually arial, mounted perhaps to a drone or helicopter. This furthermore shows the harshness of the location, as even a hand camera could not be brought, so it must have taken a lot of energy from the musicians to geth themselves and their instrumnets there.
Throughout this piece, Newett uses language features to build upon each other and show us the extreme environment the musicians find themselves in.
In The Power Of The Mind, author Malcolm Gunn uses contrast, adjectives, and listing to show the reader how the brain can result in different emotional responses to the same stimulus.
contrast is used between the two first paragraphs, one of his wifes experience of teh guatamalan rainforest and the other of his. Ending one paragraph with “This was G’s nightmare.” and the other with “For a wildlife fanatic like me, this is as good as it gets” shows this contrast well as it depicts Gunn having a great experience and his wife having a horrible one, through the use of the word nightmare. This shows how both are having completely different experiences to the same environment.
To show this environment and allow the reader to make their own perceptions, Gunn uses many descriptive adjectives, unusual for a non-fiction piece. “Unseen pit vipers coiled in deadly poise on saplings” uses many adjectives liek deadl, coiled and unseen to give the reader a mental image of the scene, and find out how their brain would react to it; similarly to Gunn, or his wife.
To demonstrate how your brain and the amygdala would control your response to this, Gunn uses listing with the line “The amygdala wraps that recognition in a blanket of fear, empathy, admiration, contempt, or whatever emotion is linked to that image”. This shows the remarkable array of emotions that you can have and that the amygdala controls. This demonstrates to us, the reader, how powerful the brain is when deciding yoru emotions.
Throughout the text The Power Of The Brain, the author Malcolm Gunn uses these language features to show the effect of the brain and amygdala on emotions, and how these emotiosn can differ wildly from person to person.
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