Order # 10329

Mengyao Sun

Scott Lerner

Writing 39A

03/05/2018

Meaning is the soul of all kinds of writing. A writing without

meaning is worthless. Every writer writes essays with their purpose.

Expressing a clarify meaning in a essay is an important step to carry the

writer’s point. A successful writing always makes people think about

the author’s idea in depth. Of course, every successful writing needs a

meaningful main viewpoint. But the most significant trait to determine

whether the article makes its argument meaningful is to see how its

development express the writer’s significant value and influence readers’

thoughts. And the most efficient way to make the argument meaningful is

to support the argument with details.

Here I want to make some examples of details in the passage

“Captioning Emily” and explain how details make meanings. This article

discussed about different meanings that different people gave on the

death of Emily. At the end of the first part of the article, there is a passage

“What I find is that I’m not the only one looking for meaning in Emily’s

death. People who knew her even less well than I did—people who never

met her—plug the hole of her death with their opinions. They stencil her

name across their cause, caption her face with their slogans.” This is a

foreshadowing for the article and for the meaning. After the background

of Emily and her death, the author set a plain stage for the trend of the

story. This foreshadowing indicated that in the rest of the article, the

author wanted to describe those purposive implication from people with

different relationships with Emily. People who heard about the death give

their selfish meaning to her death and use her death to support and create

advantage to their own proposition.

However, besides the holistic meaning of the article, fractional

meanings are also indispensable. The fractional meaning sometimes

describe the character of people in the article, sometimes express the

emotion in the article and sometimes set the theme. But ultimately, they

all give persuasion to the main meaning, the value that the author want to

state. Through the entire article, the author has mentioned “Google” and

for three times. This “Google” detail is an object . It guide the mainline of

this article and connect all those fractional meanings. Every time the

author googled about Emily, he had new discovery of either her death’s

meaningful point of its meaningless point. Every time this “Google”

detail led the author to different development of Emily’s death from

different group of people. This helped the author develop his article more

fluently and connected his evidence naturally. Also, this detail is a

character growth. It indicated that the author persistently concern about

Emily. Then in the second part, the author describe the white

supremacist website as “ In the upper left corner, against a background of

flames, a black eagle perches on a swastika. Overlapping its feathers,

which look like puffy quilt squares, is the word RESISTANCE, followed

by a skull and crossbones.”. This signal is an object detail. It presented

the radicalization of those white supremacist. And this detail indicated

that the author would give the evidence of the utilization of Emily’s death

in this website. Then after one passage, the author gave us a setting, “In

the caption under Emily’s photo, the white supremacists that run this

website describe McKnight as a “24 year old Black man” and his wife as

“a 35 year old white race traitor.” They say almost nothing about Emily

herself, except where she grew up. So they don’t know that Emily

studied and joked and hung out every day with both whites and nonwhites

like me, or that she would have found their page disgusting.”. Associated

this setting and the website, the author state a clear viewpoint that those

white supremacists only cared about the conflict between black and

white, and naturally distorted their characteristic, regardless of the

victim’s nondiscrimination. The description of website I mentioned

previous expressed the radical character of those white supremacist. Later

the character those white supremacist gave to the killer and the discussion

about the the blind idealism of those white supremacist associated

together and shaped the egoism character once again. Another evidence

the author write about in the article begin with a background “But Emily

had been opposed to the death penalty. She was a philosophy major,

believed in forgiveness, planned to become an Episcopal priest. She’d

tattooed a dove on her back as a sign of her faith”. This is a character

growth. It described Emily’s virtuousness and her forgiveness of sinners.

This is a setting. It appeared Emily’s attitude and set up a foundation

background of this crime that Emily, even as the victim, didn’t want send

the killer to death. Also this is a foreshadowing. It expressed Emily’s

attitude to draw forth to the controversy of the pro-death-penalty and the

anti-death-penalty. And then, support the meaning of the article, “A

person’s life can be boiled down to a single encapsulating principle, a

rule that sums up the meaning of all those days lived.”. The meaning of

the last part of this article is my favorite. At the beginning of this part, the

author wrote “Throughout the trial, he didn’t look Emily’s parents in the

eye, but he didn’t look down at the floor either. He looked nowhere.”

First, this description is a character growth. It build an apathetic character

for the killer, as if there was nothing about him in the court. Also this is a

foreshadowing. It use the killer’s expression to foreshadow for his neglect

of Emily which he discussed in the later paragraph. Also the “Google”

detail was mentioned again to draw forth the development of Emily’s

meaning to the killer. By Google, the author found the killer’s pen pal site

with a greeting: “Peace and love to all people we’re all leaves of the same

tree . . .” and describe it with “There’s a list of interests that’s oddly

specific but so broad as to be almost generic; it begins with “god” and

moves from “comedy” to “film production” to “lions, tigers, collecting

postcards.”. This website is an object. It described a normal, ordinary pen

pal site which normally express its owner’s interests, belief and life. It

also has a greet about peace and love, which controversial with the

identity of killer. This is a foreshadowing for later discussion about

Emily’s meaningless to McKnight, the killer. He killed Emily and got in

to prison. But on his website there was nothing about Emily, about his

anger or about his guilt. This detail indicate that killing Emily means

nothing to him. Emily had no relevant relationship with him. The victim

could be anyone. Unfortunately, Emily became the victim. Then, the

author discussed about McKnight, “When I read this page, all I can

conclude from Emily’s complete absence is that she meant nothing to

him, that her death meant nothing to him, that killing her meant nothing

to him. ” This is a character growth.For McKnight, Emily was a random

meaningless girl. But for white supremacist, for pro death penalty and for

the anti death penalty, Emily had meaning to support their own belief.

All these details I have listed provided fractional meanings and finally

they supported the holistic meaning of that article.Being different from

evince meanings directly, showing meanings with details is always more

persuasive and easier for readers to accept. Details could bring more

emotional influence for the article. They can lead readers realize

meanings by themselves, so that readers will believe in the realization

more decided.