Time and Distance Overcome

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Time and Distance Overcome essay We are, today in modern society, more than ever used to the fact that telephones (and now smartphones) play a major role in our everyday lives. It’s almost as if its become a part of us - a new limb, you might say. Believe it or not, though, it wasn’t always like that. In the essay “Time and Distance Overcome” (2008) Eula Biss tells the story of how the phone initially struggled in America, but finally succeeded and become a normal thing in every household. She uses ethos in the first paragraph by showing that she knows history and what went on at the time. This increases her credibility. She then quickly moves on to logos, as she, in the second paragraph, tries to argue as to why the telephone as a concept at the time would have seemed completely ridiculous. As she writes: “The idea on which the telephone depended - the idea that every home in the country could be connected with a vast network of wires suspended from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart - seemed far more unlikely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through wire”. She quickly tries to establish her pathos: “Even now it is an impossible idea, that we are all connected, all of us”. By using the phrase “all of us” she makes the reader feel more comfortable and involved, which in turn makes the reader more interested in the text. The structure of the text is coherent, and the theme is presented early on (that the world was not waiting for the telephone). The sentences are a mix of long and short ones, and complex, paratactic and hypotactic sentences are mixed all together. The language is mostly colloquial, with some adjectives and adverbs. There are no sound effects like examples of alliteration or assonance. There is some symbolism involved in the part where she tells about how a lot of black men were hanged from the

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