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Joyas Voladoras Essay

Decent Essays

Brian Doyle's Joyas Voladoras first appeared in The American Scholar in 2004 and was later selected for Best American Essays in 2005. Doyle’s intended audience is the general population, though his writing style attracts both the logical reader and the hopeless romantics who seek metaphors pointing to love in any way. The beginning of the essay provides insight to general information about the hummingbird, which holds the smallest, capable, and fragile heart in the world. He then explains the significance of the blue whale’s heart with comparisons, indicating that the blue whale holds a heart the size of a room. He ends his essay by expressing that a human’s heart is always closed due to the fear of it breaking, remaining constantly …show more content…

. . can be heard underwater for miles and miles (274)” and “Each [hummingbird] visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backward. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. (273)” are examples of how Brian Doyle uses the factual support, as well as emotional triggers to provide a semblance of deep understanding between the rhetorician and the audience.
His writing style is poetic, fluctuating between short and concise to long, organic, and flowing sentence structures. For example, he utilizes short, concise sentence structures to imitate the quick fluttering of the hummingbird’s flying patterns: “Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird (273)”. In contrast to the short, concise sentences, he uses the opposite effect when describing the heart of the blue whale. Instead, he uses long sentences and traditional words that are separated by commas to force his readers to read slowly and deliberately: “. . . for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale (274).” He also uses other methods to evoke feeling from his readers.

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