Different features of writing styles, when used effectively, can dramatically alter a piece of writing. They can turn a boring, monotonous article into something exhilarating to read. There are many different features of writing styles, but one of the most interesting is the use of cohesion and coherence. This use of cohesion and cohesion (or lack of) can give insight to the narrator’s emotions, intentions, and struggles. A piece can have cohesion but not coherence, or coherence but not cohesion. It can even have coherence for half of the piece and then lose it. A writer can manipulate the use of coherence and cohesion to get a desired emotional response from the reader. For example, in Orwell’s “On Shooting an Elephant”, as the narrator faces …show more content…
Eventually, he does shoot the elephant, and he dies very slowly. He essentially tries to put him out of his misery by shooting several times. He explains, “I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs” (290). He could have said the same thing with less cohesion, but it would have sounded impersonal and cruel: “I fired a third time. The third shot did it for the elephant. The elephant was in so much agony. The elephant’s whole body jolted. The elephant’s legs lost all their strength.” The cohesion shows us that it was emotional for Orwell. The use of pronouns helps it sound more realistic and the use of meta-discourse (when he says “you could see the agony of it”) helps us feel like we were there, going through it with Orwell.
On the other end of the spectrum, cohesion and coherence can be manipulated within a piece of writing to convey irony and satire. A perfect example of this is found in Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”. “A Modest Proposal” is a satirical piece in which Swift proposes that children of poor families ought to be sold and used to feed others. His thought is that this will solve the country’s overpopulation, unemployment, and economic problems. It is commenting on the way poor people are
The first cognate strategy is Clarity. Many times when we are going to write we have the ideas in our mind of what we want to share and express to our reader, however the problem is that many times we do not write it clear enough for the reader to understand what we wanted to say. The words we use, the structure and the presentation all form how clear we are writing to our readers. Whatever we include in our writing, quotations, anecdotes, stories or any other form of literature device needs to connect clearly to our main topic for our readers to get the intended meaning of our writing or else it will only
Zachary Conners SUNY – Eng. 12 Mrs. O’Malley December 15, 2014 “Shooting an Elephant” is a persuasive rhetorical piece written by George Orwell used to describe Orwell’s feelings about imperialism. Orwell uses pathos, logos, and ethos to convey his feelings towards imperialism and how destructive it can be. Born 1903, George Orwell, novelist, essayist, and critic, was best known for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty- Four. Son of a British servant, Orwell spent most of his days in India, where his father had been stationed.
he towers over the man with his trunk around his neck. the elephant's body appears almost ashy like and grey. the man has a full thick mustache that almost brings more sternness and power to him part 3- the work expresses the control humans have over animals to the point where an elephant that could easily kill the man doesn't. the mans subtle calm face he expresses with an elephant's trunk
But why would he take the war elephants? “He took them because elephants had a devastating effect upon horses who hated and feared their smell. They could also cause chaos among soldiers who had never before seen these huge creatures close up.” (Over the Alps with elephants, Rogers)
, then, “He fired. A chair fell over in his mind. He closed his eyes and opened them. ”(Findley 62) This shows his compassion for life when he hesitates to kill the horses.
The purpose of “Shooting an Elephant” was to show that sometimes people do things they know aren’t the right decision just to impress everyone else. The officer felt that,“It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him” (Orwell 4). As he shot the elephant he
All of those depictions related to the “immense” crown that had followed the narrator expecting him to kill the elephant. This can be analyzed from his own words: “I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind”. “And he also realizes that to shoot the elephant would be not only unnecessary but quite immoral. But he is not a free agent; he is part of the impartial system (Ingle,
Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is a very interesting take on how the Irish government should cure the famine that the country was then facing. However, the entire proposal was completely bizarre, and the whole point of the essay was to bring attention to the idea that they needed a solution to the all the problems they were experiencing but the proposal was definitely not it. He even had a strongly developed plan as to how his proposal would work which makes the reader feel as if he is serious about selling children, eating them, and/or using their skins as a fashion accessory; however, ultimately this proposal is not his true goal. Jonathon Swift skillfully used different styles of writing, such as imagery and irony, to show why the Irish should sell their children to the rich to eat.
When the narrator heard the news about an elephant going wild and destroying most of the Burmese homes, he rushed to find the elephant and shoot it. During his journey, he told himself that he would not shoot the elephant. But when he arrived face to face with the large mammal, with thousands of people watching, he shot it multiple times until the elephant fell. Minutes later, he came back with a different weapon brutally killing the elephant.
George did not want to shoot the elephant he had only gotten the rifle for protection, but once the crowd started to grow he understood that he would now have to shoot the elephant. He did not want the Burma people laughing at him if he just walked away without doing anything to the elephant.
Although the officer did not want to shoot the elephant and only shot the elephant to please the locals, his guilt began to affect him emotionally after the first shot. And with each shot into the elephant the guilt dug deeper into the officer’s soul. His guilt was elevated by the visualization of the locals with their knives and baskets approaching the elephant. As he understands that the elephant which was calm at the point in which he shot it, was now about to die and become a meal for those same locals.
The narrative description of the brutality endured by the elephant stayed hours after reading Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”. The barbaric torture portrayed in the statement: “He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further.” (Orwell, par. 12). He likely replayed the scenario in his head multiple times, with different outcomes.
"A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift is a satire that proposes an ironic solution to Ireland 's suffering problem with poverty and overcrowding. Swift proposes the solution of selling children to wealthy families or taverns to be cooked and served. This unrealistic solution shows how absurd of an idea was needed to get the attention of the government. The main purpose of writing his satire was to bring attention to the horrendous conditions that poverty ridden families were suffering from in Ireland during the 1700s.
Critical Analysis of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” In the work entitled “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift, the theme of social injustice is enhanced by the use of verbal irony to convey a charged message. The ambiguous title and introduction to Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece does little to prepare the reader for shocking content revealed later in the text. Swift’s work is powerful, poignant and persuasive because it strikes at the heart of the modern readers ethics, as it likely would have done for the author’s contemporary audiences. Jonathan Swift’s 1729 masterpiece is a satirical metaphor centered around the pervasive assertion, “the English are devouring the Irish.” Jonathan Swift gives a more comprehensive exordium concerning his work stating that is it “a modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents and country, and for making them beneficial to the public (Swift 1199).
In their book Cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan define cohesion as: The concept of cohesion can be usefully supplemented by that of register, since the two together effectively define a text. A text is a passage of discourse which is coherent in these two regards: it is coherent with respect to the context of the situation and therefore consistent in the register; and it is coherent with respect to it, and therefore, cohesive. Neither of the two conditions is sufficient without the other, nor does the one by necessity entail the other. Just as one can construct passages which are beautifully cohesive, but which fail as texts because they lack consistency of register there is no continuity of meaning in relation to the situation.