Writer, Joan Didion, in her essay, On Keeping a Notebook, demonstrates the importance of keeping a notebook. Didion's purpose is to explain why she feels this way. She adopts a didactic tone in order to describe her ideas and get them across to the audience. Joan uses several rhetorical devices such as flashbacks, logos, and imagery. Didion opens up her essay with an account from her own notebook. She uses flashbacks in order to do so. The second paragraph in the essay specifically states that the note mentioned in the first paragraph was found in her own notebook which quickly brings her back to the day she wrote it. She uses this device in order to appeal to the audience's pathos, persuading the them to see the benefits of keeping a notebook.
