Staring Down My Demons

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Physical journeys can have important emotional impact. Discuss this statement in relation to the text you have studied. Physical journeys can have important effects on people’s lives. As they are faced with challenges, people are overcome with different emotions and are able to learn more about themselves and the world around them. This becomes evident when studying the magazine feature article ‘Staring Down My Demons’, written by Channel Nine news reporter, Simon Bouda. The article explores the challenges faced by Bouda on his trip to Papua New Guinea, how these challenges affected him emotionally and how they made him learn new things about the world and himself. In this text, Simon is able to show readers his different emotions to the challenges he faces and what he learns throughout the journey by the use of techniques such as amplification, hyperbole, descriptive language, parenthesis and parallelism. Simon experiences desperation various times in the text when he is unable to find the information he needs to find his father’s grave. He knows it is located somewhere in Mount Hagen, Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, however, the challenge is that he does not have enough details to know where exactly it is and as time runs out he becomes less and less hopeful. In the text ‘Staring Down My Demons’, amplification is used to express Simon’s emotional desperation to being unable to find clues. An example of amplification in this text is the enlargement of important quotations that show emotion, for example, ‘I was hoping to find someone who, 33 years on, would remember my dad. Was it too much to ask?’ This is an important emotional quotation because it shows Simon’s desperation to learn at least one piece of information to help him find his father, however, the task has become a very difficult challenge. Another example of amplification in this text is the

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