Author Study – Tim O’Brien Using one writer’s tools to make our writing more betterer

Previous Strategies  Concrete, Physical Detail  Allusions  Metaphors  Intentional Sentence Fragments  Rhetorical Questions  These Tools (along with all Rhetorical Devices) serve to  Persuade readers to consider a topic from a different perspective  Encourage or provoke a rational argument  Elicit an emotional response towards a given perspective or action

What is Repetition?  As a rhetorical device, it could be a sound, word, a phrase, or a full sentence repeated to emphasize its significance in the entire text.  Typically, we don’t repeat ourselves when we speak. Using repetition in writing is both stylistically appealing and helps convey the message.  Purpose of Repetition:  Enhances the beauty of a sentences  Stresses the main point of significance  Can create a balance among sentences

First Type of Repetition - Sounds  We’ve learned about repetition in many forms previously.  Alliteration (repetition of sound at the beginning of words)  Sally sells seashells by the seashore.  Assonance (repetition of vowel sounds)  Do you like blue? PRACTICE – Write two sample sentences about bacon or food One with alliteration and one with assonance

Second Type of Repetition – Words / Phrases  Anaphora - Repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of successive clauses, sentences, or lines.  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”  Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities  I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—  Langston Hughes, - Let America be America Again PRACTICE – Write a couple of sentences using Anaphora.

Third Type of Repetition - Syntax  Repetition of sentence structure.  I was a coward. I went to war.  Tim O’Brien – “On the Rainy River”  A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.

Fourth Tyep of Repetition- Story  Curt Lemon’s death.  I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words and watch Kiowa sinking into the deep muck of a shit field, or Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree, and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening. Kiowa yells at me. Curt Lemon steps from the shade into bright sunlight, his face brown and shining, and then he soars into a tree.  Repeated repeatedly in “How to Tell a True War Story”