Another way to organize your thoughts about a specific text is to use a graphic organizer. A graphic organizer lets you look systematically at short passages from a longer text. Your teacher may divide the text for you, or you may divide it yourself; you might use the paragraph divisions as natural breaking points, or you might consider smaller sections that seem interesting stylistically. Although a graphic organizer takes time to complete, it lets you gather a great deal of information that you can use as you prepare to write an essay.

The accompanying graphic organizer asks you to take something the writer has said, restate it in your own words, identify some of the devices that the writer has used, and then analyze how the writer uses those devices to make his or her point. Note that you become increasingly analytical as you move from left to right. The graphic organizer here has been filled in for you using a portion of the Joan Didion passage that we read above.

Breaking the text into small sections, looking at them closely, and writing down your ideas about them helps you notice the stylistic details in Didion’s writing. For example, in paragraph 1, she connects two seemingly different things in the same grammatical construction (“drying the hills and the nerves”; the technical name for this figure of speech is zeugma). Later in the essay she alludes to crime writer Raymond Chandler, to facts, even to some scientific data. Collecting these bits of information from the text and considering their impression on you prepares you to answer the following questions about Didion’s style.