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All Quiet On The Western Front, Fallen Angels By Martin Luther King Jr.

Decent Essays

The most effective and influential thing an author can do while writing about war, is in some way channeling the reader's emotions. By doing this, it should interest the reader further because it will make them feel more affiliated with the text. In pieces of writing about war that we have read this year, all of the different authors use different methods in their writing. The three most compelling examples out of all the pieces of literature that we have covered this year would be, a quote out of All Quiet on the Western Front, Fallen Angels, and “Why am I Opposed to the War in Vietnam” a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. These all channel the reader's emotions very effectively.
Some may argue that using vivid imagery is a more effective way …show more content…

He does not make the reader feel a basic emotion such as happy, scared, or sad, but he makes the reader feel a sense of relatability. By saying “I thought it was cool when the woman stopped just before she reached the dikes and handed one of the kids to a guy from Charlie Company. The GI’s arms and legs flung apart from the impact of the blast. The damn kid had been mined, had exploded in my arms” Myers does this. Saying this would make anyone feel a sense of relatability. Even if the reader did not have a child, they can imagine how hard it must have been for a mother to disguise her baby as a bomb just to kill a few soldiers. Reading this would make the reader first, imagine something so drastic and morbid to happen to them, or somebody close to them. This will give the reader a sense of relatability to the story and to this terrible action.
In one of MLK’s many speeches, he also makes the reader feel related to the story. In his speech, “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam” he says “... the war was doing far more than devastating the hope of the poor at home. It was sending their sons, and their brothers, and their husbands to fight and die…” This makes the reader put themselves in the shoes of anyone who lost a family member to any war. In the same sense that Myers was able to get the reader to feel relatability in the previous quotation, MLK was able to convey through this part of his speech. …show more content…

In the book it says “A hospital alone shows what war is” and in just those seven words, the author is able to trigger the reader's emotions. This emotion is rather different than the two previous emotions, this quotation would make the reader feel small, insignificant. This would make the reader feel that in their lives, their problems are miniscule. In everyday life, nobody would say that a hospital is the perfect way to describe our almost always perfectly peachy lives. Our “problems” are basically nothing. Getting a bad grade, fighting with your best friend, a breakup with your boyfriend, all of those regular people problems, they are all nothing compared to the problems the men and women who fight for our country face every single day. For someone to say that a hospital, full of wounded soldiers is the way to describe their everyday lives, war must be something I could never even imagine. That makes me, the reader, feel insignificant, and rather

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