These pieces reflect the goals or characteristics of the essay form through their descriptive details. The writers allow the reader to step into their world as they explain their setting and meet a new character as they announce their personal beliefs or inner thoughts. What makes their stories essays are the use of the writer’s insights; they each form their own short interesting story and use that as a guide into their own thoughts. Each story follows through as if a stream of consciousness from the writer themselves. In the audio essays, the reader can feel more emotion and emphasis on the topic at hand because it allows us to feel a more “real” human connection, almost as if the person you are hearing is someone in front of you describing their life (like a movie) rather than telling and showing you with words. You feel more inclined to listen and delve into their story.

Tone is an important feature that can be noted more carefully than it would be if it was in writing. If this was a written piece, tone is something the reader would have to assume or find evidence of. But since it is audio, it is very noticeable to guess the writer’s age, their feelings towards an event/topic, and the sound of the writer’s voice gives a more accurate approach to the general topic that will be discussed. What makes the audio essay more distinctive is it actually appears more personal, concrete and universal than an essay would have. With an essay we would have to read it several times to get a gist of who was speaking, what they were saying, why they said it and what makes it so important. And with the audio essay there is no need to over-analyze the piece, it is already said through a voice. I would say since the audio essay offers more direct communication with language, it is easier to determine an essay’s overall idea. But that does not mean a written essay offers less empathy and emphasis. In fact, an written essay offers the possibility of meanings to interpret. A written essay is open for the reader to analyze form and structure, it offers the reader a chance to form opinions and question placements of words such as maybe, I, like, etc. An audio essay is limited to telling instead of showing insights which make their stories a bit too concrete.

In 81:Guns,

“If you were passing by the house where I grew up during my teenage years, and it happened to be before election day, you wouldn’t have even needed to come inside to see that it was a house divided. You could just look at the Democratic campaign poster in the upstairs window and the Republican one in the downstairs window, and see our home for the civil war battleground it was. I’m not saying who was the Democrat and who was the Republican, my father or I, but I will tell you that I am not the one who plastered the family truck with National Rifle Association stickers, that I have never subscribed to Guns & Ammo, and that hunter’s orange was never my color. About the only thing my father and I agree on is the Constitution, though I’m partial to the First Amendment while he’s always favored the Second.” (4:34-5:19).

Description takes on a major role. As Sarah Vowell describes her environment, the people and the atmosphere around her we can see she is using the irony of a house divided and war to let the reader/audience know her father and her do not agree on things (NRA). Vowell’s use of descriptions allows the reader to feel her emotions and emphasize with her as she discusses events like holding a gun for the first time. She describes the force of the gun being fired pushed her down to the ground, and feelings flowing through the veins in her body;

“But I remember holding the pistol only made me feel small. It was so heavy in my hand. I stretched out my arm and pointed it away and winced. It was a very long time before I had the nerve to pull the trigger, and I was so scared I had to close my eyes. It felt like it just went off by itself, as if I had no say in the matter, as if the gun just had this need. The sound it made was as big as God. It kicked little me back to the ground like a bully, like a foe. It hurt. I don’t know if I dropped it or just handed it back over to my dad, but I do remember that I never wanted to touch another one again.”(6:49-7:27)

Throughout Vowell audio the tone she takes is very controversial and distant. She describes a lot of differences she and her dad have up until the last couple of paragraphs, where after mentioning the plan for her father’s ashes she is soft-spoken, compassionate and respective;

“I’ll do it too. I don’t know about my mom and my sister, but I’ll do it. I’ll have my father’s body burned into ashes. I’ll pack this ash into paper bags. The morbid joker has already made the molds. I’ll go to the mountains with my mother and my sister, bringing the cannon as he asks. I will plunge his remains into the barrel and point it into a hill so he doesn’t take anyone with him. I will light the fuse, but I will not cover my ears, because when I blow what used to be my dad into the earth, I want it to hurt.”(14:40-15:14)

The last lines “Because when I blow what used to be my dad into the earth, I want it to hurt,” informs the reader that Vowell is starting to understand her father and realizes that even though they are so different they are still very much alike.

In Orlean’s excerpt, she uses the “Visible Cow” as a metaphor for thinking about the essay’s form and structure. Applying Orlean’s metaphor, to John McPhee’s “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” the invisible cow can be seen in McPhee’s story by closely examining his narrator and setting. McPhee’s presents us with a story which compares the game Monopoly to the real world, which brings us back to Orlean’s lines “…an essay in which the writer turns something over and over in his or her head, and in examining it finds a bit of truth about human nature and life and the experience of inhabiting this planet”(176). Not only does McPhee take the use the game Monopoly to examine the real world, he also helps the reader make connections to the game as he contrasts the difference between the world in the game and the  present reality of those same places in the world by listing historical facts and background information.

McPhee’s narrator is one that Orlean would applaud at. Orleans mentions that a writer must “be explicit, in the first person, or just implicit, as the person behind behind the words”(176)in order for the readers to be “invited deep inside someone’s mind” (176). Which is exactly what McPhee has accomplished “Go. I roll the dice-a six and a two. Through the air I move my token, the flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range”(9). He has built a narrator who dictates the story in first person, without ever revealing who they are or what they think as a character and thus allowing the reader to delve into someone else’s mind and form their own opinions.

McPhee’s form and structure throughout his context allow him to explore two different worlds at once. One where the narrator is sitting down and playing a board game of Monopoly and the other where he is able to become a part of the game walking down boulevards and avenues of the properties; “I turn on Pennsylvania, and start back towards the sea.The windows of the Hotel Astoria, on Pennsylvania near Baltic, are boarded up…”(15). His structure allows him to contrast the past and present time of these properties and give a social critique of both its people and places.This act might constrain him to become a visitor describing the scenery since he does not form any direct opinions. Compared to the other essays we have read so far McPhee’s text outlines perfectly to what our Textual Essay Rough Draft is supposed to resemble. It gives an objective like the game of monopoly and compares it  the world we live in along with a personal account of someone playing the game while imagining themselves figuratively in it, and ends with a abstract meaning about the search for a better society.

After reading Sara Levine’s “The Self on the Shelf” and Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams” it can be agreed that when you encounter an essay, ideally, “[y]ou leave the essay feeling as if you have met somebody” ( Levine 159). Like Jamison’s Empathy Essay teaches us you need more than just a pair of eye to examine and understand another individual’s pain. You need to be able to feel and think as they do, you have to be willing to put yourself in their shoes in order to understand what emotions they are going through. In Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams,” I have met a female Ob-Gyn who plays sick in order to train medical students to become great emphatic doctors. She, herself has survived an abortion and heart surgery. Through her story we learn that Jamison is not only critiquing and examining her medical students but is also placing herself on the exam table; both her medical and intellectual wounds are open to our critique as well. Throughout her essay, Jamison attempts to elicit different venues of emotion from her readers as we explore the pain of other characters like Stephanie Phillips, an STD Grandma, Blackout Buddy, Pregnant Lila, Leslie Jamison herself and her brother’s Bell Palsy. Jamison’s honesty and openess is what allows her to be open to critique and thus evoking empathy towards her situation.

Some of the lines I believe allow her personality to communicate through her writing is “I thought of the little fetus…honestly wondered – if I felt attached to it yet. I wasn’t sure”(11), ” I felt guilt that I didn’t feel more about the abortion; I felt pissed off at Dave for being elsewhere” (11), ” I needed his empathy…to help me discover which emotions were actually there.” (13), “to feel the mechanics of her method so palpable between us: engage the patient, record the details, repeat. I hated seeing the puppet strings; they felt unseemly – and without kindness in her voice, the mechanics meant nothing…it’s invasive but not intimate”(23) and lastly “When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft” (25).

These lines reflect a personal account of Jamison’s struggles. They are intimate moments where we can relate to other’s pains. Everyone in life has many moments where they interpret someone else’s pain, they absorb emotions and sufferings of others in order to better understand the meaning. As readers and writers we are taught to put our selves on a shelf, to reexamine ourselves in another light and leave learning something new. Our words leaves an impression of ourselves as writers for others to criticize and judge however they please whether we mean to or not. Like Levine stated, “it is style that allows the essayists to make a self…[an] essayist writes his private voice for the public”.  The way we make an impression as a writer is through our words.