Autobiographical Significance: Handling Complex Emotions

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 Analyze 
Use the basic features.

Remembered events that have lasting significance nearly always involve mixed or ambivalent feelings. Therefore, readers expect and appreciate some degree of complexity. Multiple layers of meaning make autobiographical stories more, not less, interesting. Significance that seems simplistic or predictable makes stories less successful.

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a paragraph or two analyzing Desmond-Harris’s handling of the complex personal and cultural significance of her remembered event in “Tupac and My Non-thug Life”:

  1. Skim the last two sections (pars. 8–13), noting passages where Desmond-Harris tells readers her remembered feelings and thoughts at the time and her present perspective as an adult reflecting on the experience. Consider Desmond-Harris’s dual perspective—that of the fifteen-year-old experiencing the event and the thirty-year-old writing about it. How does she use this dual perspective to convey complexity?
  2. Look closely at paragraph 8, and highlight the following sentence strategies:
    • Rhetorical questions (questions writers answer themselves)
    • Repeated words and phrases
    • Stylistic sentence fragments (incomplete sentences used for special effect)

    What effect do these sentence strategies have on readers? How do they help convey the significance of the event?

    Question

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Note that in academic writing, stylistic fragments may be frowned on; one of the instructor’s purposes in assigning a writing project is to teach students to use formal academic writing conventions, and it may not be clear from the context whether the student is using a fragment purposely for rhetorical effect or whether the student does not know how to identify and correct sentence fragments.