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Explanation: Staying Truer to My Own Argument

Through the techniques and styles learned from Unit 2, I found that re-reading Didion’s essay over and over again, looking deep into my past for the emotional aspect of every memory, and listening to songs that I associate with the memories I write about, was ultimately what helped me gravitate towards Didion’s essay as well as give me the best chance to cover. From the moment I read Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” I immediately created a personal connection through the text. There were so many aspects of Didion’s writing that I just found beautiful. I admired her use of asterismos and anadiplosis, and really wanted to work on those rhetorical devices is my own writing. The reading, in a sense, helped me better understand myself before I even chose to cover the essay. At first, I was scared to cover the essay because I had a feeling it would come out cliché, or that there was no possible way to come close to what Didion had done, but nonetheless, I finally decide to cover her essay and found it to be the perfect choice. Comment by Manuel Sanz: Thank you thank you thank you for being so precise in being able to name what you took from the original essay. Comment by Manuel Sanz: Wow – really insightful.

I never really wrote about my parent’s divorce, and not to be too narcissistic, but it seemed to be more intense and more detrimental than most anyone else’s I knew. It had given me all this time to be completely on my own. My parents never knew what I was doing or where I was, or who I was living with. So, I took advantage of all this freedom, and began doing things that were clearly wrong, as well as initiating bad habits for the rest of my life. But I was having fun. I was having more fun than I thought imaginable, and I really saw that in Didion’s essay. She too was making these interesting memories and doing things she had never done before. And I saw in Didion’s essay two reasons why everything seemingly didn’t count in the beginning. Firstly, Didion, like me was very young so mistakes were natural, and we didn’t know any better. Secondly, regardless of Didion’s intention, I also began to notice that everything Didion and I were doing didn’t play a role in creating a bright future, I wasn’t doing anything that counted. I spent two years of my life doing stuff that just didn’t help my future self out, and because of it, I barely made it to college. I noticed this in Didion’s essay and it was something that really spoke to me. Comment by Manuel Sanz: Yes. Good.

It seems to be a weird set of rules to me. That the more you get caught up in having fun, the less the future seems to matter. I believe that here is where Didion and my essay are most connected. We both have this sense of youth, exploration, and a live fast mentality, but before we realize the direction in which we are heading, detrimental consequences begin to take a way a lot of opportunity. Whether it be for me, my mom, or Didion, there are just things in our lives we can no longer do because of the things we did in our pasts. So, I chose to make this argument. And I chose to do it through the influence of my parent’s divorce. I think it’s of great importance to realize that divorces do play a large role in shaping the lives of the kids involved, and in times like that, everyone can be selfish. Comment by Manuel Sanz: How true.

Didion’s nostalgia, and mature depiction of her time in New York, was another factor of the essay that proved to be of upmost importance. The way Didion writes with such nostalgia, energy, and beauty, is something that is truly necessary in writing an essay of this nature. Through this, I noticed that when writing a cover, one has to get in the same headspace as when the story took place. One has to write with excitement and awe, all the while abstaining from letting judgement of what happened dampen the memory itself. I found myself listening to songs to help me remember and really feel the events I was writing about. Comment by Manuel Sanz: So insightful, Jack.

The writing process on the other hand, took far less time than I had expected. After reading Didion’s piece around five or six times, her language was very easy to emulate. With the combination of reminiscing about past memories, listening to music, and reading “Goodbye to All That” many times, I knew exactly what I wanted to say and was able to write the essay within five or six hours. Through looking into all my memories, it was easy to analyze them and figure out what they mean in the larger scheme of things. So, I just had to show what I was doing, and how it was connected to the next event until the timeframe was covered.

The revision process however, took nearly twice the time. The majority of time spent on the revision was testing lines and deleting them. I allocated a large chunk of my time to figuring how Didion’s sentences, lines, and metaphors really affected what I was trying to convey. Specifically, I focused on the line “It would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.” It seemed as though here I wasn’t giving enough hints or clues to what I was actually doing wrong. Therefore, I decided to separate myself a little from Didion’s writing and ask a few questions that take the blame away from me. I wrote things like “how was I supposed to know.” While it was simple to write in a few lines, I believe the questions I asked really shows the reader how young and ignorant I was, thus proving my argument a little better. Comment by Manuel Sanz: Very good.

Another major change to the draft was cutting out the sentence on page 4 “everything had counted.” For Didion, she was truly able to make the reader weary of how everything was counting against her, but for me, I saw fit to scrap this line, and talk more about how leaving home at an early age really changes a person. Therefore, when I said that “if you leave home one too many times you’ll never call it home again,” I thought this would show my cover’s true colors more than Didion’s line would.

Another major change that I saw fit was to add in detail to the paragraph about the police station. While initially this came across as a metaphor, I intended this paragraph to be the climax of the paper, and where all things went irreversibly wrong. Therefore, I expanded the details, and rather than using Didion’s metaphor “It is distinctively possible to wait too long at the fair,” I used some of her wording but changed it enough to show that I was in charge of the meaning. So, I abstained here from Didion’s metaphor in order to show a really emotional side of my essay which reflected more of my own experience.

Finally, the last big change I made to my essay was to incorporate a metaphor with gardens. I’ve always been interested in gardens, so I added in a new introduction paragraph that previews life before the divorce. It is a short description, but I thought it would go a long way in showing the transformation into the new timeframe. It also served as a way to give the reader an idea of what happened before I go on talking about how I had changed as a person, which hopefully keeps the reader more engaged. Then, I was able to add in a few lines to compare where I currently was in relation to the state of the garden at the very beginning. I found this to be a nice connecting piece which does something a little different than Didion’s version. Ultimately through the revision process, I really tried to focus more on my own argument, rather than including so much of Didion’s lines. This lead to me cutting out a few of Didion’s lines, which conveyed more closely the argument I intended to make.