Dillard vs. Woolf

993 Words4 Pages
Dillard’s “Death of A Moth” has a much different theme than Woolf’s “Death of The Moth” in the sense that Dillard essentially talks about how a person must use the skills they are blessed with everyday, non-stop until the day that they die, while Woolf essentially talks about how insignificant each person is in the world and how in the end, none of us really matter. Both Dillard’s and Woolf’s essays are very similar when the title is taken into account. However, they are notably unalike when structure, imagery, and writing style are considered. Both Dillard and Woolf write in a very intricate and complex way, making them unique in their own way. Dillard’s structure is noticeably dissimilar to that of Woolf’s due to the fact that her essay seems to be very unorganized when time or tense is examined. In the beginning of her essay, she seems to be talking in the past and somewhere along the line she switches over to present tense without distinctly notifying the reader of this conversion. She wastes no time in diving in to her story about the spider behind the toilet; she begins after a brief four line introduction. She continues to tell her story about the spider for three paragraphs. In the fifth paragraph, she jumps out of the story of the spider behind the toilet and begins her story about how she would go up to the Blue Ridge Mountains just to read and about the moth that flew into the candle flame and burned alive. This story proceeds to the conclusion of her essay. Woolf’s essay on the other hand is substantially easier to follow due to the fact that she stays in present tense throughout her entire essay. Opposed to Dillard’s, her word choice is rather advanced, however, due to the simplicity of her paragraph structure; it is much easier to follow. Other than Woolf’s difficult diction, the other factor that makes her writing hard to follow by the
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