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Summary Of Total Eclipse By Annie Dillard

419 Words2 Pages

In Annie Dillard’s Total Eclipse, sources, ideas, and information are connected in surprising ways. By using phrases and metaphors like “The grasses were wrong; they were platinum,” and “The grass at our feet was wild barley,” or even “A piece beside the crescent sun was detaching,” she describes the effects of the eclipse through distorted imaging, because certainly those things were not happening. Throughout the whole essay, Dillard jumps around from her feelings and the effects of the eclipse to her past experience with partial eclipses and compares them; she also adds in pieces of what she sees in her husband, Gary, and his reactions/different appearances throughout the eclipse.
Her intriguing ways of keeping the readers interested could …show more content…

Throughout elementary, middle, and a good portion of high school I was taught and expected to write in that formula. Based off my learnings of that formula and what I’ve learned about how Dillard’s piece is put together, I’d say she breaks a quite a few of the rules I was taught.
Although she does begin with an opening sentence to grab the attention of the reader, she then proceeds to reiterate the same phrase in a different way with a little more detail. In some ways that would be considered repetitive, and she seemingly does that a lot with descriptions in the essay. For example, she describes the grass as “platinum” in one paragraph and then a short while later describes it as “wild barley.” In the conventional five-paragraph-essay, you’re taught that the opening paragraph should begin with a clever attention-grabbing sentence and have your thesis statement and 3 supporting ideas to that statement that you would proceed to go into detail about in the next three paragraphs. The fifth and final paragraph would be your conclusion and in that you would restate your thesis and close it off. Dillard begins with that attention-grabbing sentence, and then more-so leads off into telling a story. She keeps the essay alive by using phrases and metaphors that are vivid and expressive, yet they’re absurd, impractical, and

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