ESSAYS

The Stunt Pilot by Annie Dillard is considered an essay wholely due to its ability to grasp the audience's attention and successfully keep it throughout the entire essay through minuet details that cater to different senses. It covers the natural anticipation of a human by setting a stage before the planes take off. She states that after the announcer had been "squawking all day", "now he quit", "the crowd stilled", and "children watched dumbstruck". As each line builds to create a picture of anticipation in everyone's minds in the scene, the reader becomes entranced as well. The author also combines words that unconventionally speak the truth in order to adhere to the reader's passionate side, as the scene was surrounded by "pure energy and naked spirit". As the writer describes these wonderful, adrenaline-filling emotions the reader can't help but to relate to these ideas. Lastly, the author surfaces such small details as if the audience were a passenger in the plane. She says that their "faces and internal organs trailed pressingly behind on the curves.
Gay Talese's Ali in Havana is an "essay" because of its incredible characterization. It is not simply characterization of each figure but rather a description of their relationship in proximity to the main character, Muhammad Ali, encompassed within the characterization. In addition, to justly decribing their looks, the author also chooses to include their mannerisms as Ali had shaky hands from "Parkinson's syndrome", and thus moved "quite slow". Talese then goes on to describe Yolanda, his wife, as a "large" and "pretty woman", but also slips in the fact that she "converted to Islam from Catholicism when she married Ali". Describing her in terms of Ali puts a bigger specturm on the story, as well as interconnects everything to the main idea for the audience. Gay does this again when describing Ali's first wife, Fraymari, as "barely higher than the midsection of his (Ali's) embroidered guayabera".