I first just want to say wow to this personal narrative; it brings to light a whole other side that most people don’t know about their teachers, that they have had real, interesting, and even news-worthy lives. I hope I can do justice in writing about it.
The subject of this piece is Denise’s experience on music tour with her boyfriend. I think that this particular piece is really relevant, especially to college kids, like those she teaches, because most college kids want to live the illusion of grandeur the rock life gives: the drinking, the crazy nights, popular drunk use, women throwing themselves all over, loud music, breaking things, lack of hygiene, and just in general going crazy and not having consequences. Yes, higher education is the goal in college, but it isn’t what defines college. Beyond just being an account of her experiences on tour, it goes into her feelings and reactions to things that happened, were said, etc. during that time and pulls the reader into the experience, feeling her feelings, understanding her thoughts, and reacting themselves. I doubt the intended audience was a college English class, and judging from the article, it was meant for readers of this magazine, Scene, people who were probably interested in music, and Denise’s point was to show the dirty underbelly of the rock and roll tour world that is glamorized often in media. Touring is real work, and exhausting as Denise describes. She was sharing her story, almost as a warning, a kind of exposé on the tour life, and I can imagine that, for an English professor, writing this story down was a sort of cleansing and relieving experience, a way of dealing with everything that had happened, and organizing her memories.
My favorite rhetorical device used was the dialogue. It just added another layer of flavor to the writing and a “wow” factor over the things that some people really do say to each other. To me, the dialogue just made the writing so real, I can’t even explain why the little snippets were so powerful to me. It was definitely a pathos pull because of the emotion and reality that dialogue and quotes represent. Emotions can be glossed over or embellished in writing, but true quotation should just be simply the spoken words. I really want to incorporate more dialogue effectively into the memoir piece I’m about to write, which would involve remembered more conversations effectively, and also knowing which ones, and which snippets of which ones, are the most powerful and effective for my purpose.
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