F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say." This quote applies directly to Ngugi Wa Thiong’s novel A Grain of Wheat. One could infer from this quote that some writers write not just for the enjoyment derived from it, but rather out of a feeling of obligation to let readers hear what they may have to say. Ngugi’s message that he feels obligated to convey is delivered, however, he uses a very unusual writing technique to arrive there. He wants the readers to understand the pain, suffering, and confusion that took place during the Emergency. Through jumbled chronological order, numerous character and point of view changes, and a powerful conclusion, Ngugi relays his message with immense authority.
The writing style Ngugi uses in this novel is quite impressive. The most obvious difference in this writing opposed to the other two stories we have read is that without maintaining chronological order, he travels from the start of the Emergency in Kenya to the conclusion of the Emergency. One can understand the complexity of this time shifting by examining the first four chapters. Ngugi begins the novel with Mugo experiencing a nightmare six days before Uhuru. Immediately the readers begin questioning exactly what is taking place. Then, Mugo is awake and begins walking through the town. The entire first chapter is following Mugo through his day. Ngugi gives the readers the names of people who are not yet significant to the story. In the beginning of the second chapter, Ngugi proceeds to lead the readers into a history lesson of the beginning of the Emergency. He starts by examining the original leaders of the movement and explains...
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... say something. He writes because he has something to say,” he made a valid statement. Not every writer has something that needs to be heard, but some authors do. Ngugi found a very unique way to deliver a message that needed to be heard, with great strength and passion.
Works Cited
Hall, Donald. Literary and Cultural Theory: From Basic Principles to Advanced Applications. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.
Miall, David. "Poetics 19." Readers' Response to Narrative: Evaluating, Relating, Anticipating (1990):
323-339.
Palmer, Eaustace. An introduction to the African Novel. New York: Africana Publishing Corporation,
1972.
Thiong'o, Ngugi. A Grain of Wheat. Jordan Hill, Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1986.
Vipond, Hunt. "Point Driven Understanding: Pragmatic and Cognitive Dimensions of Literary
Reading." Poetics 13 (1984): 261-277.
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The most important part in writing a novel is to enable the audience to understand what is being communicated. Krakauer did so by clearly communicating his message to his audience. He wanted to share the story of McCandless, a young man who dreamt of conquering the wilderness alone. This conquest ultimately ended in failure and cast a feeling of sorrow upon his family and friends. With the exception of a slight difficulty to understand the story during certain chapters, Krakauer’s novel was full of thrill of emotion and life-lessons.
Brown does a fantastic job of arranging the chapters in an order in which readers can take the accumulated knowledge and apply it to the next step that they reach when working through the survival guide. The introduction really gets the reader off on a good start as they dive into the thick of WHAT THEY DON’T TELL YOU. This brief description introduces readers to the premise behind the whole book in terms of the goal of each chapter. Brown probably says it best when he writes that the introduction is “all the ‘stuff’ that has to be said” before he can communicate what it really is that he wants to get across. In Chapter o...
Writing is a form of communication that can be expressed in various ways. The short story “On Keeping a Notebook” written by Joan Didion guides the reader through her thinking process as she tries to answer why and what it means to write in her notebook. Although, it can be difficult to follow and understand her thinking it fascinates me to see her thinking process come to a full circle. I felt a personal connection with her when she writes “We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting that ourselves; taught to be diffident, just that this side of self-effacing.” Didion’s statement made me realized the experiences one has can affect one’s perspective as one writes and reads despite how
Although the greater picture is that reading is fundamental, the two authors have a few different messages that they seek to communicate to their audiences. “The Joy of Reading and Writing” depicts how reading serves as a mechanism to escape the preconceived notions that constrain several groups of people from establishing themselves and achieving success in their lifetimes. “Reading to Write,” on the other hand, offers a valuable advice to aspiring writers. The author suggests that one has to read, read, and read before he or she can become a writer. Moreover, he holds an interesting opinion concerning mediocre writing. He says, “Every book you pick has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones” (p.221). Although these two essays differ in their contents and messages, the authors use the same rhetorical mode to write their essays. Both are process analyses, meaning that they develop their main argument and provide justification for it step by step. By employing this technique, the two authors create essays that are thoughtful, well supported, and easy to understand. In addition, Alexie and King both add a little personal touch to their writings as they include personal anecdotes. This has the effect of providing support for their arguments. Although the two essays have fairly different messages, the authors make use of anecdotes and structure their writing in a somewhat similar
Short stories are temporary portals to another world; there is a plethora of knowledge to learn from the scenario, and lies on top of that knowledge are simple morals. Langston Hughes writes in “Thank You Ma’m” the timeline of a single night in a slum neighborhood of an anonymous city. This “timeline” tells of the unfolding generosities that begin when a teenage boy fails an attempted robbery of Mrs. Jones. An annoyed bachelor on a British train listens to three children their aunt converse rather obnoxiously in Saki’s tale, “The Storyteller”. After a failed story attempt, the bachelor tries his hand at storytelling and gives a wonderfully satisfying, inappropriate story. These stories are laden with humor, but have, like all other stories, an underlying theme. Both themes of these stories are “implied,” and provide an excellent stage to compare and contrast a story on.
Many people think that reading more can help them to think and develop before writing something. Others might think that they don’t need to read and or write that it can really help them to brainstorm things a lot quicker and to develop their own ideas immediately (right away). The author’s purpose of Stephen King’s essay, Reading to Write, is to understand the concepts, strategies and understandings of how to always read first and then start something. The importance of this essay is to understand and comprehend our reading and writing skills by brainstorming our ideas and thoughts a lot quicker. In other words, we must always try to read first before we can brainstorm some ideas and to think before we write something. There are many reasons why I chose Stephen King’s essay, Reading to Write, by many ways that reading can help you to comprehend, writing, can help you to evaluate and summarize things after reading a passage, if you read, it can help you to write things better and as you read, it can help you to think and evaluate of what to write about.
Storytelling’s impact on people who use it has been life saving in certain cases. By asserting the existence of different perspectives, writers get to suppress their own opinions in order to sympathize with others. (insert thing about meta-fiction) With this idea in mind, author Kate Taylor wrote the novel Serial Monogamy, a meta-fiction of a writer recalling the story of her husband’s affair and her deal with terminal breast cancer, all through her telling of Dickens’ secret life and tales of the Arabian Nights. In Serial Monogamy, storytelling makes people more understanding as they explore new perspectives.
It has been said of Anton Chekhov, the renown Russian short-story writer, that in all of his “work, there is never exactly a point. Rather we see into someone’s hear – in just a few pages, the curtain concealing these lives has been drawn back, revealing them in all their helplessness and rage and rancor.” Alice Munro, too, falls into this category. Many of her short-stories, such as “Royal Beatings” focus more on character revelation rather than plot.
Students have been writing essays since education was formalized centuries ago. There are several formats that they are taught throughout the course of their formal education, two of the most common being; Narrative, and Descriptive. Both of these have distinct characteristics that define them, and while they share many similar qualities and are developed to make the reader immerse themselves in the story. Narratives tend to have the power to capture and persuade on a deeper level than most descriptive papers. Two prime examples are the narrative I Want a Wife by Judy Brady and the descriptive essay Fish Cheeks by Amy tan. While they both do an exceptional job at delivering a lesson Brady’s causes you to think from the beginning, her use of the rhetorical devices such as pathos, ethos, and logos are incorporated with a heavy use of sarcasm and harsh remarks that claws for the reader’s attention.
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Any author's primary goal in story writing is to convey an idea or topic to their reading audience. The conventional wisdom on this thought is that the clearer this is conveyed, the greater the appeal to the reader. However, some authors feel the need to resist this trend and forge new paths that sometime leaves the meanings of their stories obscure and hidden from the average reader. Donald Barthelme has taken this optional approach with his story "The Indian Uprising". There are several reasons that I did not fully enjoy this post-colonial short story.
The notion of writing has been defined in many different ways by writers. According to Byrne (1997), “writing is producing a sequence of sentences arranged in a particular order and linked together in certain ways”. In other words, a writing or a text includes sentences arranged in a coherent and grammatical way to connect the ideas together. In addition, writing is interpreted as the act of expressing ideas, thoughts, and feelings to other people in writing symbols so that readers can