Reflections on Class

In the past few days, we have talked and discussed the purposes, the evidences, the personas, the audiences, and styles of pieces we have read. For Nickel and Dimed, we came to the conclusion that the purpose of the book was to let people know about the problems of low wage jobs. Barbara writes in first person and proves the purpose from her personal stories because she actually went out there and experienced the lifestyle by taking low wage jobs. She also gives facts and statistics to prove her point. She writes this book for the middle to upper class people in America to let people know how bad the situation is. These would be the people that could make changes and sadly enough, are the ones who have enough money to pay for the book. The style of Barbara’s writing uses humor and sarcasm. She also uses great description with imagery and metaphors.

For The Great Gatsby, we determined that the purpose of the book is to show that the reality is that reality of society is appearance. The evidence for this is that Gatsby creates a new self for the society because he makes himself rich. Also, it is the story of Gatsby versus all the lies and gossip about him. The story is told through Nick and the book’s audience is for the 1920s exuberant upper class. Fitzgerald uses the style of vivid description, imagery, and manipulation of time to make this book interesting.

For the Carlos Fuentes piece, we came to the conclusion that it had two purposes. They were that he was trying to show how language is important to express culture and history and about the creation of cultural identity. The selection was a told by Carlos and he gave his personal experiences to prove his point. The audience of this piece is Americans and he uses description to show his story, instead of telling. In conclusion, we have had in-class discussions over three pieces and talked about their purposes, the evidence, the personas, the audiences, and the styles.