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Lucas Enrique Fernandez

Shipping Out

Description:

David Wallace’s Shipping Out is the paradigm for the power of words. In this text Wallace encompasses the reader with bountiful description, enabling them to feel as if they are really experiencing the same things as the writer. His words are so precisely chosen for a reason, when readers are fed more descriptive and vivid words we latch onto the messages that they carry. By doing this, the points he made throughout the text were that much clearer and more persuasive.

Her real birthday, she informs me on Monday, isJuly 29, and when I quietly observe that July 29 is also the birthday o(Benito Mussolini, Mona’s grandmother shoots me kind of a death-look, although Mona herself is excited at the coincidence, apparently confusing the names Mussolini and Maserati.

In this blurb, it makes me as the reader feel as if I’m sitting with a friend and they’re telling me a story from last week. The humor in the story and description involved lure me in and make the writer more likeable. By making his story more appealing, it makes me more susceptible to other messages stored in the text.

I felt despair. The word “despair” is overused and banalized now, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. It’s close to what people call dread or angst, but it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable sadness of knowing I’m small and weak and selfish and going, without doubt, to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.

Here the word despair is thoroughly analyzed and placed in the situation of the cruiseline. Although originally I would not associate despair with a cruise, Wallace uses his words to persuade me as the reader and it actually made sense.

An ad that pretends to be art is-at absolute best-like somebody who smiles at you only because he wants something from you.

Here Wallace explains his negative feelings towards what a famous writer wrote in an ad for the cruise. The way the ad controls how you are to view the cruise shows the power of words, although it may sometimes be a dishonest power. Wallace seamlessly weaves together his points about the ad, along with the relinquished control once on the cruiseline, along with the feeling of despair that brings. By using description the blend of these ideas of at the end of the chapter is possible due to the ease by which the information was distributed to the reader.

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