TTTC is carefully crafted, with each word and phrase holding meaning, even the punctuation building the underlying meaning of the work, creating a new and unique style of writing. This is especially evident with his pairing of certain verbs with specific actions, such as “They made themselves laugh” (O’Brien 14). Sentences as simple as this, which are repeated throughout the book, show how hard these soldiers have to try to express feelings that are usually spontaneous and happy—but through the use of “made” change this meaning entirely. Furthermore, O’Brien sometimes chooses to utilize or omit punctuation when writing the spoken words of a character. He does so to “enhance the unconventionality of his writing” while creating a wholly unique style of penmanship, innovating writing itself, not just his genre (Evans 208). And TTTC is not limited just to prose, but has rhythmic elements, consonance, and meter. In doing so he creates an anaphora , where these words receive the most stress, and therefore the most attention (Evans 212). This is especially evident when O’Brien discusses the things they carried: “[they] carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained,” where both the “kuh” sound and the “rrr” sound are repeated and stressed due to the rhythm created. It is no surprise, then, that “O’Brien’s prose is often praised as effectively ‘rhythmic’“ (Evans 212). These are one of many ways that O’Brien employs to create such a detailed and impactful world to amplify the novel’s meaning.
O’Brien has crafted his novel with extreme care. In The Things They Carried , each word holds powerful meaning and so does each comma and quotation mark. The Things They Carried , as one would guess, is about the things that the soldiers in the Vietnam War carried, the clothing, the guns, the bullets, etc. and their weights. But these physical weights are all described in the first chapter of the book. The rest of the book, then describes the emotional weight of the war on the soldiers. While O’Brien does do this through plot, such as having a soldier shoot a dog out of boredom, he also illustrates this emotional weight through his diction and syntax. Through sentences as simple as “They made themselves laugh” show how actions that are spontaneous and relaxing—through the use of “made”—become anything but (O’Brien 14). Furthermore, O’Brien sometimes chooses to utilize or omit punctuation when writing the spoken words of a character. He does so to “enhance the unconventionality of his writing” while creating a wholly unique style of penmanship, innovating writing itself, not just his genre (Evans 208). But The Things They Carried does not only contain elements of prose, but also contains poetic elements, such as consonance and meter. In doing so, he creates an anaphora , where these words receive the most stress, and therefore the most attention (Evans 212). This use of anaphora is evident when O’Brien discusses the soldiers’ cowardice: “They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained” where both the “kuh” sound and the “rrr” sound are repeated and stressed due to the rhythm created (O’Brien 14). In the sentence preceding, O’Brien uses meter when listing out emotions: Grief, terror, love, longing. Here, the first two adjectives are negative, and the next two are positive; they invoke opposite emotion (O’Brien 14). The meter follows this as well: “two accented syllables followed by an unaccented syllable (“grief, terror”), which are balanced by two more accented syllables followed by another unaccented syllable (“love, longing”)” (Evans 211). His explicit meaning is matched and intensified by his use of meter. It is no surprise, then, that “O’Brien’s prose is often praised as effectively ‘rhythmic’“ (Evans 212). These are one of many ways that O’Brien employs to create such a detailed and impactful world that amplify the novel’s meaning. In fact, every example of O’Brien’s craft in this paragraph was from one page of his book. With such density of craft, The Things They Carried is undoubtedly a literary masterpiece, and deftly fulfils this requirement of a classic.
This excerpt, discussing O’Brien’s craft, is the first body paragraph in my rough draft and my final draft.
My rough draft excerpt does not include much of a background for the book, and neither does the rest of my essay. Thus, in the final draft, in revising my essay I added background about The Things They Carried, making the final paragraph much longer than the rough version. I also replaced TTTC with The Things They Carried, the proper book title. Furthermore, in the rough, many of my sentences are very long, and so I re-wrote or edited some of the sentences to be much shorter or split in two, such as changing the first sentence from “TTTC is carefully crafted, with each word and phrase holding meaning, even the punctuation building the underlying meaning of the work, creating a new and unique style of writing.” to “O’Brien has crafted his novel with extreme care.” which added more syntactical variety while still conveying the same ideas as before.
In writing the research essay itself, I planned my essay before I even wrote a rough draft: first finding sources, then creating an annotated bibliography detailing how I would use those sources, and an outline laying out my essay’s structure. Due to the long writing process of this essay, which took a month from start to finish, I was able to layout plans and revise drafts to create a finished product.
My research essay shows mastery in my ability to plan out an essay before I write it, and after having written a draft, to revise and edit that draft to create a more polished essay.