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How Proust Can Change Your Life

Satisfactory Essays

It is a beautiful seventy- five degrees, with the sun shining and calm breeze in the air. You are in your room with the window cracked and music softly playing in the background. You sit at your desk to start reading your history homework. Next thing you know you wake up and two hours have passed by. While your body might have just been tired, it is likely that you became bored with what you were reading. In Alain de Botton’s book, How Proust Can Change Your Life, de Botton writes about factors that effect a reader’s attention. It is important to be aware of these factors in your own writing so your paper isn’t boring to the reader. THESIS Everyone has experienced insomnia but most likely never wrote seventy pages about the experience. Proust wrote a novel about being unable to fall asleep and was given negative feedback. One reader said “I don’t understand a thing, but absolutely nothing. Dear Marcel Proust, stop being a poseur and come down to earth. Just tell me in two lines what you really want to say” (Botton 34). The author did not engage his audience in his writing. When the writing does not appeal to the audience, the reader is unable to relate to the author and becomes disinterested. In Joseph Williams book, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, addresses how emphasis must be placed in writing. Emphasis can occur at the beginning or the end of a piece of writing. Williams states, “When readers build up momentum in the first nine or ten words of a sentence, they

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