5. "Auscultation" by Steven Church

Steven Church, an english professor at California State University in Fresno and multi-award winning author, is also the author of an essay titled “Auscultation” about the importance of rhythm sensing technology. Church uses a personal story of his as well as two horrific events of trapped miners to convey his point. The essay begins with an event in which an earthquake traps six miners under 1,500 feet of dirt and rescue teams attempt to listen for the sound of thumping, but are unable to hear anything and ultimately give up the search, assuming the miners are dead. The essay continues to talk about how another doctors device is what allowed Church to first hear his child’s heartbeat, the first sign and sound of life. The essay ends with another tragic story of trapped miners, but this time they are able to hear the thumping of hammers, locate the earthed prisoners, and ultimately rescue them. Metaphors, imagery, or any other common rhetorical devices are not evidently used in “Auscultation”. Instead, Church relies on raw emotion. From a tragic story of six innocent deaths, to his heartfelt recount of hearing his child’s first heartbeat, and finally ending on a happy note of persistence and salvation, “Auscultation” successfully conveys the importance of sound detecting devices by showing the detriments of a world without them, as well as the benefits of a world with them. These potentially life saving devices range from the human ear to the doctor’s stethoscope and Church insists that neither be underestimated in their importance. Again, by rhetorically using raw emotion evoked by a personal anecdote and two very similar real stories with dramatically different endings, Steven Church accomplishes his purpose of communicating the importance of sound detecting devices to those who may not appreciate them, or take them for granted.

Laennec examining with a stethoscope. Painting by Robert Thom

4. "Magical Dinners" by Chang-Rae Lee

To most of us, Thanksgiving dinners are traditional, family gathering meals that have been practically the same as long as we can remember. Chang-Rae Lee, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the Asian American Literary Award, and current professor of Princeton’s creative writing program, attempts to show us the experience of a customary American meal from his perspective, that of a young Korean immigrant in New York, in his essay titled “Magical Dinners”. To do this, Lee uses the rhetorical tools of imagery and similes. The essay begins with him and his family on Thanksgiving Day waiting for the Turkey to finish cooking. Having no previous experience of Thanksgiving, Lee states, “I can already imagine how my father will slice into the grainy white flesh beneath the honeyed skin of the breast, this luscious sphere of meat this is being readied all around the apartment complex.” While many of us are already very familiar with Thanksgiving turkeys, through Lee’s use of imagery, we are offered a window into his point of view and how his first Thanksgiving turkey is perceived and imagined by someone who is entirely new to the traditional holiday and meal altogether. Later in his essay, while describing his experience with another common American dinner, Lasagna, Lee states, “my mother runs down her shopping list - it’s as if she were at the library searching for a book in the stacks, trying to find the particular spices and herbs, the right kind of macaroni, the right kind of cheese or cream...each decision another chance to mar the dish beyond my ignorant recognition.” Here, Lee uses a simile to compare his mother’s search for the proper ingredients to the often difficult and tedious search for specific books at a large library. This is particularly effective in conveying his and his mother’s perspective and confusion because in most supermarkets, we are familiar with where certain ingredients usually are found, but almost everyone has a somewhat hard time finding the exact book they are looking for among thousands of others. This allows us to relate the difficulty of finding the right books in a library to their Lee’s mother’s struggle of finding the right ingredients in an American supermarket. I believe Lee is ultimately successful in communicating his foreign experience of common American meals to those familiar with them through his rhetorical use of imagery and similes.

"The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth" (1914) By Jennie A. Brownscombe

3. "Port-au-Prince: The Moment" by Mischa Berlinski

Mischa Berlinski is a relatively young American author who has already won several awards including the Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Addison M. Metcalf Award, and finished as a fiction finalist for the National Book Award. His 2010 essay titled “Port-au-Prince: The Moment” attempts to convey his experience of the days following the catastrophic Haitian earthquake of the same year to anyone who wasn’t there to experience it themselves. Berlinski successfully does this through the rhetorical use of imagery, irony, and metaphors. The essay itself opens just as the earthquake is beginning, and is described by Berlinski as, “a series of rolling waves, each sharper than the one before.” He uses this metaphor of comparing the 7.0 magnitude earthquake to waves because while very few people have experienced an earthquake of any magnitude, most people have been in either a pool, the ocean, or some other body of water in which waves may be present. This allows his audience to understand the feeling of the quake by relating them to the familiar feeling of waves. A little further into the essay, Berlinski recalls his family’s initial reaction to earthquake and states, “Cristina was in tears. The baby was collected and calm.” Here he uses irony as you would suspect his wife’s and baby’s reaction to be switched. Normally, his wife, a full grown and matured woman, would have be “collected and calm” and you’d expect the baby to be crying. However, the reality was in fact the opposite. Lastly, he uses imagery to describe scenes that the average person has never seen. Berlinski states, “A very large woman wearing a yellow bra cradled an unmoving bloodied child in her arms.” This paints a graphic picture in our imagination that without such use of imagery, may not have been possible. It is for these reasons and Berlinski’s use of imagery, irony, and metaphors that I believe he accomplished his purpose of communicating his experience of the Haitian earthquake and that of the days following to those who were not there to experience it firsthand.

Haiti Earthquake Building Damage by Flickr Upload Bot 

2. "Rude Am I in My Speech" by Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips is a second generation Kittian-British novelist, playwright, and essayist. His notable awards include the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and receiving the Commonwealth Writers Prize twice. In his essay titled “Rude Am I in My Speech”, Phillips discusses and attempts to explain the plight of first-generation immigrants relative to gaining social confidence in an entirely new country in which they are the minority. The audience of this essay is primarily second and third-generation immigrants, such as Phillips himself. He aims to do this by using the rhetorical devices of historical and literary allusions to the extent that the essay’s title itself is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Othello, as well as the use of a personal anecdote. His primary allusion is to Othello in Shakespeare’s play by the same name in which a lone celebrity immigrant moor arrives in Venice, marries a white woman, but is not looked down upon because of his celebrity status. With no other immigrants and due to his celebrity, Othello eventually goes crazy, killing his wife and later himself. However, as Phillips discusses the story of his own father, also a first-generation immigrant to Europe, there are two key differences: his father did not migrate alone and he was not a celebrity. Phillip states that these differences are what allowed his father to successfully fit-in (as much as is possible for an immigrant) because his father could be whoever he wanted in his own home, and when he was out with other immigrants. This allowed his father to stay sane by giving him a sort of “break” from who he had to become and act as around the European locals. In a historical allusion Phillips states, “When West Indians first arrived in England in the 1950s, countless pamphlets were thrust into their hands which explained to them the ways of the English.” This allusion demonstrates the pressures placed upon immigrants to behave in a certain fashion in England that would otherwise be abnormal for them. By using literary and historical allusions along with an anecdote of his own, I do believe that Caryl Phillips accomplished his purpose of communicating to second and third-generation immigrants like himself the plight of their parents and grandparents relative to finding their place in a foreign society.

"Othello and Desdemona in Venice" by Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856)

1. "Topic of Cancer" by Christopher Hitchens

In his essay appropriately titled “Topic of Cancer”, award winning author and journalist Christopher Hitchens attempts to explain to those without cancer, how it feels to those who do have it. Hitchens’s extensive list of literary awards include the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, the National Magazine Award for Columns, the Richard Dawkins Award, and, most notably, the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. In this essay, the main rhetorical device Hitchens sticks to using is metaphors in order to achieve his purpose of communicating how it feels to be diagnosed with cancer to his audience of those who haven’t been diagnosed with it. He begins with the metaphor of comparing himself and others diagnosed with severe illnesses to, “citizens of the sick country”. He then continues to describe his initial experience as a self proclaimed citizen stating that, “The new land is quite welcoming,” and, “Everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work.” By using this metaphor, it makes his experience of becoming a patient more easily understandable to the common person who has never had a severe illness, but perhaps has been to a new place or country allowing them to relate their experience to his. He continues his use of metaphors while comparing his cancer to an “alien” that, “had colonized a bit of my lung as well as quite a bit of my lymph node. And its original base of operations was located - had been located for quite some time - in my esophagus.” By using this metaphor to describe his cancer, the common person can relate what they’ve seen or heard about aliens in movies and science fiction, most often characterized by their hostile and invasive nature, to what it feels like to actually have cancer. Ultimately, I do feel that Hitchens accomplished his purpose of conveying how it feels to be diagnosed with and having to live with cancer through the use several specific yet very familiar metaphors.

Alien Invasion from http://www.scificool.com/the-alien-invasion-will-never-end-even-in-year-12/