Response to Course Materials 9/9/12

During the first week of school, we worked on memorizing the literary terms for our quiz on Friday. At first, I thought I could analyze literature well, because I thought I knew everything I had to look for, like diction, sentence structure, imagery; basically all the terms we had learned up until now. I hadn’t realized there were still so many terms and techniques that writers used that we hadn’t been exposed to yet. After looking at all the literary terms we needed to learn for the test, I realized there was a lot more to sentence structure than I had originally thought. Words such as anadiplosis, anaphora, antistrophe, and chiasmus had never come across in my reading or vocabulary before. While I had seen sentence structure like that before, I had never known that it was a literary technique. But after understanding what these words meant, I realized that many of the books and movies that I have seen and read employ these strategies to draw attention to those sentences.

For example, in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the famous quote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” uses the antistrophe technique because of the repetition of “of times” at the end and the anaphora technique because of the repetition of “it was” at the beginning of the two phrases. Before understanding these terms, I would have never caught the significance of the sentence structure of this sentence. Another example is the song “Life is Wonderful” by Jason Mraz, his lyrics “it takes an egg to make a hen/ it takes a hen to make an egg” is a great example of anaphora because both phrases start with “it takes.” It is also an example of chiasmus because the phrases have reversed the order of the words. Before being able to understand and apply these words, sentence structure like this, would have gone right by me. But now, especially after we work with these words and techniques more, I can distinguish the different literary devices. This will help me not only understand an author’s writing and style better, but it will help me when I am analyzing literature in the AP Exam.