The last section of essay packet #1 (Total Eclipse By Annie Dillard)

This weeks blog will focus on Annie Dillard's article from Teaching Stone to Talk, Total Eclipse. This specific section of the book focuses on language, diction, and communication. Dillard used pathos and her personal experiences to interest the audience and attach them emotionally to her writing. Many of her sentences where hard to dissect and find the real meaning but I can tell that Dillard intends for her audience to read between the lines, "I turned back to the sun, it was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong," (Page 91). That line is so interesting to me, you can have the worst day of your life but the sun keeps moving and the billions of other people in the world, they keep living. When you put life into perspective and realize how small you are compared to everything around you, you are able to maintain a more serene mindset: sanity. Dillard's adjectives (language) was absolutely amazing, I could create vivid visuals and pictures in my head of what she was describing. Dillard describes her experience in 1979 as she traveled to experience an eclipse. She described the scenery as her eyes peeled out the window on the long car ride with her husband Gary. 

This writing was impressive, one of the few that i've enjoyed this semester and for an essay I enjoyed the risk that Dillard took to go in such depth with her personal stories to get her voice and adventures out there. The only bad thing I have to say about this is I feel as if she was "too" descriptive for me. She got her point across and then would continue on explaining when it was not necessary. This essay could have been several pages shorter and still the same, if not better quality, by getting to the point and deleting the filler words she used so frequently. By using her personal experiences to communicate with her audience and teach them something through her credibility she proved herself as an author in this article