Brent’s Vocab Choices… Oh Yeah!

Communication.

Brent employs an informal diction so we can connect more with him as a burn victim. We are able to take part in his life because he lets us in. Throughout the book, we are able to see intimate feelings, and a lot of mixed emotions that occur in just a few months while he is in the hospital, and in his pathway to recovery. He changes a lot because of this episode in his life and we are able to see this in the way that he refers to things and persons in his life.

Brent makes his memoir unique by showing emotion. In every sentence, even if he is just aggravated and just f-wording the world, he shows emotion. ‘This fucking sucks’, ‘I have to fucking share a room..’ pg 175 Once again Brent Runyon’s choice of words makes the memoir distinctive. He curses and he is inappropriate, and this is normal in a teenager.

Once again, he writes to us telling his story as if he were 14, so he can connect more. He uses common expressions to relate to us ‘that’s awesome’ ‘so cool’. ‘that sucks’-156 We relate to the authors language because he writes/speaks just like us.

In many ways this is a very masculine book, I’m not a boy, clearly. But many of the readers are, and he tries to connect to this audience. He doesn’t only use ‘distinctive vocab choices’, but he expresses himself as a 14-year-old boy would. “I’m definitely getting an erection…”pg 156 I cant relate to that but I am sure a teenage boy can. “Who takes her shirt off and has really nice tits.” Pg 98 This style is more likely to appeal to this kind of audience. I am talking to much about audience here. Audience isn’t really my point. Anyhow, Brent’s style and expression are shown because of his different choices of words.

“Going to get nightmares” pg 152.

You can’t just say that, end the paragraph and start a new one. He does this to create a more familiar environment he doesn’t really finish the sentence but we understand what he wants to say and communicate to us.

And, at the end of the book in the acknowledgements, Brent uses different choices of sentences. “Thanks to my mom and dad and Craig…” instead of writing thanks to my mom, dad and Craig. He adds the and maybe just because he wasn’t sure he wanted to include Craig in his acknowledgment, or he wanted us to make it seem like it but really he just wanted to make one last grammatical error.

The different ways that Brent writes all relate to diction because what he is really doing is trying to get to us and by his different choices in his writing we can understand his style.