“Outward Bound” –Elle
by Molly Young
http://www.elle.com/life-love/travel/women-travel-memoirs-oregon
The author, Molly Young, begins by establishing an immediate connection with the reader that most of her target audience will be able to relate with, at the very least can imagine and sympathize with her. She speaks in a very relaxed tone, and although she does not tell an anecdote, I got the feeling that she was speaking directly to me. The chosen language was very colloquial and the sentences were constructed shorter than usual print copy, which also helped in the conversational and familiar tone. As an introduction, this worked well because I wanted to listen to her because she was open and vulnerable as a writer and established herself as “one of us” and not some highly paid, pretentious writer who new nothing about her audience.
Young also writes out her internal dialogue and allows the reader to follow her in her thoughts and reasoning process. This helps to better understand her point of view and her purpose for this piece. She doesn’t just argue on one side of the argument, but goes back and forth and flip flops on the issue. This is our natural way of thinking and she becomes more believable as I read.
When the piece shifted the focus to Bend, Ore. the author used descriptive imagery and really painted the environment and atmosphere in Bend: “If Oregon were a thumbprint cookie, Bend is where the jam would go: smack-dab in the middle of the state, a landscape thick with juniper, hemlock, and ponderosa pines, with Mount Bachelor slicing upward, like a shark fin, in the distance. It is a place where the concentration of dogs and American-made pickup trucks is high, and where wooden homestead cabins from the 1800s still stand.”
The dialogue moves the story along, as well, as there personalities are reflected in one of the only action scenes of the pieces. The author is experiencing her first hunting experience and she chose to recount the adventure with dialogue mixed in with her first hand details. “Snow falls overnight, and when my alarm trills, I put on more layers than I’ve ever worn: long underwear, jeans, fleece, woolen overalls, rubber boots, and a beanie. It is impossible to cross my legs. ‘I might have to stop a few times to pump,’ Lily warns when she picks me up. Sam, asleep at home, is still breast-feeding.
‘Where are we going?’ I ask.
‘I don’t even know what you’d call it,’ Lily muses. ‘The middle of nowhere, I guess.’”
The ending is what works the best and resonates the most with me. Young is clear and upfront with the fact that her 15 hours spent wandering the hill was a failure. This was not just another success story with an inspirational ending, but rather an excerpt from real life where lessons are learned. Young was honest, and as a reader, stories like these are hard to find.
“Postscript: Aaron Swartz” (1986-2013) –The New Yorker
by: Caleb Crain
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/01/postscript-aaron-swartz-1986-2013.html
The very first sentence feels like a slap in the face: its brutal, honest and direct. The author, Caleb Crain, immediately drops us into the focus of the piece without any lead or warning. Effective? I think so. It mirrors the same delivery that he experienced finding out the news. “When I checked Twitter Saturday morning, I learned that the programmer, writer, and activist Aaron Swartz had killed himself at age twenty-six.” After three sentences of reaction to the news, Crain backpedals into background on Aaron Swartz and uses more specific details to set up the story. In an article that carries as much weight as this particular one, this intro work for me.
Throughout the profile on Swartz, Crain’s reverent tone explains Swartz’s accomplishment and highlights his achievements in the programming and journalism spheres. Just by recounting what he Swartz has accomplished, the author evokes his admiration to the audience, which carries over by his manner of describing the subject. Crain describes how he is grateful to him, that he is “cool,” and how he impressed him. The reader easily gains respect for Swartz as well, even without seeing him action.
The ending was structurally interesting as he debated a point that seemed to negate his entire piece. Throughout the article, Crain raved about Swartz and his accomplishments, but upon mentioning the fact that others describe Swartz as a martyr after committing suicide, which followed his arrest, Crain argued that he did not agree. His tone and attitude switched and he explained why he thought he was suddenly wrong for his actions. He manages to slip quotes from Swartz’s blog and offer his personal insight, but Crain shifts again in tone to address a bigger issue. In the last two sentences, he seems to speak to those who might be struggling with suicide and addresses the So What? question. His direct style of writing and personal tone turned what first seemed to be a profile into a personal essay.
Both of these pieces are essays, not short features, which are written in third person. Any time a story begins with “I” you can bet it is an essay, written from the author’s point of view and using her/himself as the primary source. It’s important to note the difference in these two styles of writing. Other than that, good comments on both.