Outside Reading 2-3

Date: Nov. 4^th
Title: The Day My Father Learns He’s Losing His Mind
Author: Deborah Jiang Stein
Type of reading: Reflective Essay
You can find the actual article I read from the website below:
http://www.pifmagazine.com/2010/11/the-day-my-father-learns-he%e2%80%99s-losing-his-mind/

Reflective essays—what tone have the author adopted? How does the author create this tone, and how does this affect your response to the content of the piece? Would this tone work for an AP essay? Why or why not?

             The writer’s father used to be a language scholar and a very elegant person. According to the writer, her father “savored aged cheeses and knew the exact vineyard of every bottle in his cellar collection gathered from regions where our family wandered in succulent vineyards in France,” and he used to study at Harvard, Yale, and received Guggenheim Fellowships. However, as the father getting old, everything about him changed.

             In the essay, the writer describes how her father is getting old and how he is losing his mind by making vivid contrasts of her father’s early years and what he is like now. For example, the image of a wine connoisseur and the image of a glass of milk at the side of her father’s TV, Paradise Lost and Winnie the Pooh, Harvard and a book that is held upside down are the pairs of contrast that show what kind of change is occurred to the writer’s father. Despite the vivid contrast, however, the language is strictly restrained. Like she said “I sat at his side in the neurologist’s waiting room, took his hand, the size of a large paw which once terrified me, and leaned into his
six-foot plus frame,” she only says that her father’s big hand “once terrified” her, but no more. We can see that she doesn’t get terrified any more is because she knows that her father is now old and weak, and through this line she is showing the restrained internal sorrow and regret toward the aging of her father.

Even though it would be very hard to watch her father changing as a daughter, the author doesn’t seem to reveal much sadness she may feel. Rather, the tone of the writing is very serene; I think it would is because of that she has accepted that her father is now old and he has Alzheimer. When people accept a fact they usually not tend to be frustrated by the same fact very much; it is just hard for them to face the things at first. There is still a hint of regret in her tone though, but she seems to be facing it bravely. Moreover, author’s personalized narrative seems to touch the readers’ hearts even more, and the “fading” kind of mood also contributes to making the article more gripping.

As an informal essay, I’d say the tone is interesting and appropriate but in AP essays I don’t think the tone should be encouraged. First of all, in the AP test, we need to show that we are very sure about what we are writing. But the tone used in this essay is not assertive enough. Also, in the test, we need to appear to be more objective, but the narrator is too personalized in this essay.