Tanmayee Yenumula: Outside Readings (Set 3): Reflective Essay 1.9.11

Dad by Samantha Craggs is quite different from other reflective essays that I have read. However, it still conveyed a message quite strongly and worked well.

This piece talks about Samantha’s experience with her alcoholic father. Her tone is very emotional throughout the piece and, towards the end, turns to pride.

There are no “space-fillers” in this piece. Craggs immediately gets to her point from the very first sentence: “The older I get, the more my father means to me”. Her no-nonsense abrupt beginning pulls the readers into the piece. As she goes on talk about the experiences she had when her dad was battling with alcoholism, the clear contrast from the sharp beginning to the emotional memories really cause the reader (in this case, me) to empathize with her. For example, Craggs had written: “The logic of this [one of her dad’s statements] was too far-fetched to debate. He was a master of grand, sweeping statements that made little sense. Statements that caused my self-esteem to crumble”. As Craggs writes about how her dad’s alcoholism affected her, her sentence structure is simple and she doesn’t use overly fancy words.

She keeps the word variety and literary techniques to a minimum, but the lack of the vast amount of literary techniques is what allows the reader to really understand the piece and connect with her emotions. However, I did notice that although even those statements were quite simple, as Craggs “matured” into a college student and as her father worked on giving up alcohol, her sentence structure and word variety becomes even simpler. For example, when Craggs enters college, she writes about how her dad also parted ways with his alcoholism: “He didn’t use a 12-step program. No support groups for him. He just stopped. With the same determination he once used to get drunk, he stopped”. This causes a shift from the emotional tone to a more prideful tone. This is where, the reader has to use a more logical and analytical approach to understand this shift in tone. I feel this way because when her father was an alcoholic, the situation was complicated and all of the emotions were also quite complicated. As she talks about her dad giving up on alcohol, she makes a parallel with life in general, how it becomes so much less complicated. Thus, the muck of emotions doesn’t really play a huge part in her tone anymore. All she feels now is pride for her father quitting, and pride for herself, as she ends the essay saying, “I look at my school pictures still hanging on the walls in my parents’ room and I smile. My heart swells with pride. I look just like him”.

I don’t think this piece will work well on the AP because although the tone can be figured out easily enough, it isn’t too dependent on literary techniques, which are kept to a minimum. The reader must take a more logical and analytical approach with this piece as opposed to focusing on the technique used. While this piece can evoke strong emotions, the biggest weakness of this piece is that it doesn't make use of many literary devices.