The Use Of Weather In Santa Ana By Joan Didion

Didion personifies the wind as almost an unknown epidemic. Similar to when an unknown disease goes viral, all walks of life are affected. Didion clearly states how teachers, students, doctors, to physicists, to generally everyone becomes unhappy and uncomfortable during the winds. She does not write of how the wind caused fire to ravage the shrublands, but she writes of the symptoms it inflicts on the people. Didion mentions all the after effects of the wind and the harm it can do like inflict paranoia. She mentions how the fear-stricken victims of southern California are paranoid like her neighbor that refuses to leave the house and her husband who roams with a machete. Didion’s personification of the wind focuses on a fearful and distant light.

With the use of emotion, Didion is able to describe the horrifying causes the Santa Ana has on human behavior through murders and horrible wind conditions. “On the first day

Malmar McKnight’s frightening story, “The Storm”, weaves a violent storm and murder together to heighten the horrific fears that engulf Janet Willsom. “The Storm” is a combination of Mother Nature, Janet’s emotions, and her heartbreaking dilemmas. The eerie mood is revealed throughout the story. Figurative language helps the reader bring the story to life in his/ her mind. The author’s use of irony is devolved through Janet’s changed perception of the storm.

The second half of the opening to her essay, which deals with the scientific aspects of the Santa Ana winds, is mostly explanatory. “To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior,” she state in a serious yet not overbearing tone.

Joan Didion uses pathos to argue that Santa Ana causes people to have weird behaviors. When Joan uses the example that the “Indians would throw themselves into the sea,”(Didion) she creates the emotion of sadness and shock. Didion chose these emotions to show that the wind makes people do strange actions. She also says that, “every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands necks. Anything can happen.”(Didion) She causes a sense of horror using the excerpt from, “On nights like that” by Raymond Chandler. It gives a sense of horror because it shows how far the wind can make people do bad actions when the wind blows. Joan Didion incorporates

The author wrote this essay based on her experience of living in Los Angeles and dealing with these horrific winds. The focus of this essay was all on the dangers that the Santa Ana winds has brought to the state of California, specifically the southern parts. The message of this essay was that the Santa Ana winds were able to drive the citizens to the edge. This message was shaped throughout this essay, using rhetorical devices and moves in the text. The rhetorical devices this text uses are tone and syntax. The tone of this essay was serious and devastating. In the beginning, the author was serious in her tone about a topic that is very grim. “I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it.” This quote explains the author describing how no one has heard that the Santa Ana winds are coming, but everyone knows it’s coming because they can feel it. This quote is poised in such a serious matter that the reader can sense the tone in this very sentence. The syntax that is represented in this essay is when the author is foreshadowing the rest of her essay in the first sentence. “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension.” This quote explains how something doesn’t feel right, which the reader can infer that the author is talking about a Santa Ana rolling in sometime soon in the

Throughout the beginning of the passage, the author uses an array of different rhetorical devices to give us a glimpse about Douglas Spaulding's feelings towards the beginning of summer.Ray Bradbury utilizes personification in sentences 1 through 5. For example "The town covered over with darkness...the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow." The author drives a clear picture of a mysterious atmosphere by the use of the word "Darkness". By adding "The wind had the proper touch."

Didion shows that California is not the only place affected by these winds, many places in the world are as well. She uses the winds and their effects such as increased suicide rate, depression, nervousness, atypical blood clotting, and more, as a metaphor for life and the world in general. The world and life, just as the winds, is in an unnatural state at all times. In the winds, “…the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions” and no one seems to know why. Similarly, insanity in life can hit anywhere at any time, with no explanation why. The overall purpose of Didion’s text is to not only show that these winds truly do have a detrimental effect to some extent on the lives of the people living in California, but also to show that life is just as unpredictable as life and people overall.. Thomas’s overall message of his piece is to primarily say that humans are greedy and take advantage of nature. Therefore, people need to have more respect for the Earth and natural resources and disasters that come with

In Joan Didion’s essay “Los Angeles Notebook,” she uses multiple rhetorical devices to shift a reader from tension, to urgency, and finally to manifestation in order to convey that supernatural elements and their repercussions have the ability to influence an individual’s actions and emotions. Primarily, Joan Didion introduces the reader to an aura of tension in her essay - using foreboding, apprehensive diction and short syntax - representing how the winds affect the people they touch, even before they literally reach them. Didion exemplifies foreboding diction in the opening paragraph by using the words “uneasy,” “tension,” “unnatural,” and “stillness,” which paint an apprehensive picture by their apposition. Words such as these add an

She creates a dramatic tone in order to convey to her readers that the winds have a mechanistic effect on people. Thomas’s purpose points towards the positives

Didion and Ascham both begin their writing by using diction to introduce their viewpoints. Didion begins talking about the Santa Ana winds and immediately gives the reader uncomfortable feelings about them. This impression is begun by the word choice in the opening paragraph with words such as “uneasy”, “unnatural”, and “tension” to let the reader know what she is about to describe is not a good thing. Didion's backs up her view with more words like "ominously glossy", "eerie", and "surreal" to describe how the environment is changed when the Santa Ana Winds arrive. These words ignite a sense of terror and let the reader know just how scary and terrifying Santa

The use of chaotic adjectives to personify the boisterous wind helps create a violent environment which symbolizes the chaos that will follow. Petry’s description of Mrs. Hedges’ eyes as “still and as malignant as the eyes of a snake” also help create a violent and malicious mood. The dominant

Didion’s choice of words is one of the most important contributors to the mood she develops in her essay about the Santa Ana Winds, and gives the essay ethos as well. Although she does not use too much personification, the little she does use about the wind “whining down the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes” sets up the rest of her description of what the winds do in a way that almost makes it seem that the wind is a malevolent being, set on scorching the mind and surrounding environment. Her use of adjectives unquestionably reverberates her negative opinion on the winds; she blatantly calls them “bad,” and “malevolent.” The ominous, uneasy description of the heat and weather support that view.

Primarily the idea of limitation or confinement is presented as the story begins: "the high gray-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest