This editorial outlines the hardships and consequences of foreign adoption based on personal experience.
Diction: The author's choice of words adds much to her piece. From the get-go, she describes her decision to adopt three Russian children as "quick" and "based on little information". This sets the tone for the editorial as she later goes on to explain how her experience with foreign adoption would have been better served if she knew more about the children she was bringing into her home. She outlines the unexpected "challenges" she and her husband were forced to face such as the "serious" medical and psychiatric problems of the children. As her children grow older, the problems only augment, yet the author uses words such as "admittedly" in order to grant her children the benefit of the doubt in situations and repeatedly expresses her "love" for them. This illustrates the good intentions the author had in raising her children despite the trials she was forced to undergo. The diction forces readers to feel a strong sense of empathy for the author as well as to understand the different emotions foreign adoption must bring.
Imagery: The author's uses imagery to convey the flaws within the foreign adoption system. In response to the author and her husband's pleas to the adoption agency for help in taking care of their new children, the service personnel merely replied "were sorry to hear that". This illustrates the apathy of the foreign adoption service to the problems of families once they have adopted the children. Also, it shows how the author and her husband were forced to handle the three children and their issues alone, without the aid or an organization or support group.
Furthermore, the author uses imagery to illustrate her children's destructive behavior. She explains how "she and her husband had to put locks on the doors" in order to keep the kids from stealing. Simple reprimands proved useless as the author details how she and her husband continuously tried to tell the children that "we don't do this in our family" but to no avail. The authors use of dialogue and her description of the lengths she and her husband were forced to go illustrates the trials the author's family underwent as well as their lack of support from outside agencies.
Details: The author's choice of details is important to the work. She explains the children's tendency to steal, their aggressive personalities, and their numerous health problems, such as "fetal alcohol syndrome" and a "traumatic brain injury", in order to contrast between what the author and her husband expected their newly-adopted children to be like, and what the children were in reality. Furthermore, the author chooses other details to illustrate how she and her husband put a great deal of time and effort in order to raise the children. She details that the she and her husband continuously showered the children with attention, by "playing with them" as well as "finding Russian speakers to talk to them and read stories in Russian", and taking "months" off of work. However, she illustrates that her efforts were not well rewarded as she addresses how her and her husband were "charged with neglect", unjustifiably, when one child "decided not to live at home". She also outlines her children as she knows them today as apathetic to her and her husband's affection demonstrating a lack of relationship between the two parents and their children despite time and effort spent in order to foster one.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/04/14/when-adoption-isn-t-easy.html
To be honest, I didn't feel like the author used very distinctive diction at all in this piece. No words she used really jumped out at me and gave me a deeper meaning.
ReplyDeleteI also feel like the author really doesn't use very strong imagery either, the sensory descriptions just weren't really there.
I do believe that your analysis of the details is spot on. I feel like this piece really doesn't have a strong voice to it or any deeper meanings. I feel like you picked a very tough piece to analyze. It really is written more for information than literary enjoyment.
She does a good job of utilizing the diction of the piece to explain the feeling of empathy that readers feel. At first I was confused by the paragraph and I was unsure where it was going, the examples of diction seemed to be disjointed and unrelated but with the ending sentence it all made sense. Possibly a short intro of the diction and what it creates at the beginning could help. The specific uses of imagery prove to be very effective. After reading the response I getting a vivid picture and understanding the difficulties of the adoption system. She picked her examples of imagery quite poignantly. With the details paragraph I think something more elaborate than the intro she has now would add a lot to my understanding of the writing and the ease of understanding the relation the details have to the creating an effect in the work.
ReplyDeleteHello! I know we didn't have any sort of guidelines for format for this assignment so I'll skip right over that. I think the first paragraph was as pointed as it could have been as there was quite a bit of summary and you didn't mention diction until the end. Here, it's not such a big deal, just be careful in your actual essays. I definitely got an idea of the author's life from your second paragraph, your point and evidence were well connected, although the evidence you used was not particularly descriptive or sensory language so I'm not sure it really falls under imagery. The details paragraph was good, the details the author provides sound heartbreaking. Just make sure to connect the details to the effect they have to the overall meaning.
ReplyDeleteLike Will I was confused reading the first paragraph, but it made a lot more sense after reading the last line of it. Might I suggest putting that sort of thing at the start of the paragraph next time/with things like this so your reader knows where you're going a bit better?
ReplyDeleteI think some of your imagery examples might fit a bit better under the details category. Although they definitely support the point you're trying to make, they feel more matter-of-fact than anything; I really didn't get much of an image of events as I read your examples.
I thought you examples of details were good and you linked them back to something bigger, as you did with the other paragraphs, which I thought was excellent.
Going back to the article again after reading your response, I feel like it didn't have a whole lot to offer other than details; you did a good job eking examples out of a pretty to-the-point article.