Another way to organize your thoughts about a specific text is to use a graphic organizer. A graphic organizer lets you systematically look 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.
| QUOTATION | PARAPHRASE OR SUMMARIZE | RHETORICAL STRATEGY OR STYLE ELEMENT | EFFECT OR FUNCTION |
| There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior. | The winds are creepy. They bring sand storms and cause fires. People know they’re coming without being told because babies and maids act strange. The speaker picks a fight and then gives up. The Santa Ana winds make us aware that human behavior can be explained in terms of physical causes and processes. | Personification: the wind whines | Giving the wind a human quality makes it even more threatening. |
| Cumulative sentence | She makes her point by accumulating details about what it means that the Santa Ana is beginning to blow. | ||
| Two short sentences: “The baby frets. The maid sulks.” | Those simple sentences reduce human behavior to irrefutable evidence. We can’t argue with what we see so clearly. | ||
| “rekindle” | Though she’s talking about restarting an argument with the phone company, the word makes us think of starting a fire, like the wind does up in the hills. | ||
| I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather.” My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake. | Didion talks about her early experiences with the winds, plus the folklore about them. She mentions things that seem weird — peacocks screeching and a very quiet ocean. She says her neighbors are strange too; one stays indoors, and the other walks around with a big knife. | Subordinate clause in the middle of that first sentence: “when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach.” | The clause accentuates Didion’s isolation and because it’s so long almost makes her experience more important than the Indians who threw themselves into the ocean. |
| “peacocks screaming in the olive trees” | Kind of an upside-down image. Peacocks are usually regal and elegant; these are screaming. Also olive trees are associated with peace (the olive branch). Supports the idea that the Santa Ana turns everything upside down. | ||
| Compound sentence: My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. | “And” as the coordinating conjunction makes the wife hiding and the husband with the machete equally important. | ||
| “machete” | “Machete” is associated with revolutions in banana republics, vigilantes. Suggests danger. | ||
| “On nights like that,” Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, “every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.” That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom. | Didion quotes a writer who describes the effects of the wind as causing women to want to kill their husbands. She says that folklore sometimes has a basis in science. | Allusion to Raymond Chandler | Chandler, who wrote crime fiction, was known for his hard-boiled style and cynical views. The allusion to Chandler helps create the ominous tone. |
| The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushes through, is a foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. . . . A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. | This section gives scientific facts about the Santa Ana wind, including its generic name, foehn. Didion names other winds like it in other parts of the world, but says the foehn has its own characteristics. She names some of the effects the foehn has on people in various places. | Complex sentence: “There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best known of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind.” | The details accumulate, ending in “hot dry wind,” to create a picture of the “persistent malevolent winds.” |
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.