The excerpts from Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood and Barbara Ascher’s Dancing in the Dark tell of their feelings both past and present about their experiences when going through the adolescent periods of their lives. Dillard and Ascher write in different styles overall but still use some of the same schemes and tropes of rhetorical grammar. Dillard favors long sentences full of commas and semicolons as she tries to fit as much detail as possible into each statement. Most of her sentences last three lines on the page, but her longest sentence spans almost five with details such as “laughing with Ellin” and “dancing…across a polished dining-room floor.” Dillard’s details show rather than tell which would have been great if the excerpt
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Her sentences average at about two lines on a page with only one sentence reaching four lines. Ascher also likes to use sentence fragments as well as tiny sentences to place emphasis on certain parts of her story such as “Connect the dots…The ultimate romance.” Every word of Ascher’s story matters and fluff is kept to a minimum, unlike in Dillard’s story. Also unlike Dillard’s confusing order of events, Ascher’s excerpt actually has a chronological order of events that combine into a story that can be told quickly and without meandering along. Dillard uses secondary sources in her work like an Episcopal priest, a doctor from the University of Geneva, and a famous poet to give it that extra variety that helps the reader connect with the story. To a lesser extent than Dillard, Ascher uses repetition in her work, which is seen in the first paragraph when she repeats the word “myself” six times. Then in the seventh paragraph, she uses parallelism in “design over chaos, love over rejection” to emphasize her point about faith when she references James Annan. Antimetabole is used in the excerpt as a way to emphasize two different perspectives in one statement like in “a dog barking…a barking dog;” in one part the dog does the action and in the other the dog is described as
Her sentences average at about two lines on a page with only one sentence reaching four lines. Ascher also likes to use sentence fragments as well as tiny sentences to place emphasis on certain parts of her story such as “Connect the dots…The ultimate romance.” Every word of Ascher’s story matters and fluff is kept to a minimum, unlike in Dillard’s story. Also unlike Dillard’s confusing order of events, Ascher’s excerpt actually has a chronological order of events that combine into a story that can be told quickly and without meandering along. Dillard uses secondary sources in her work like an Episcopal priest, a doctor from the University of Geneva, and a famous poet to give it that extra variety that helps the reader connect with the story. To a lesser extent than Dillard, Ascher uses repetition in her work, which is seen in the first paragraph when she repeats the word “myself” six times. Then in the seventh paragraph, she uses parallelism in “design over chaos, love over rejection” to emphasize her point about faith when she references James Annan. Antimetabole is used in the excerpt as a way to emphasize two different perspectives in one statement like in “a dog barking…a barking dog;” in one part the dog does the action and in the other the dog is described as