David Helwig's, "Haunted by lives unlived".

Essay by PunnCollege, UndergraduateA+, May 2003

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David Helwig's, Haunted by lives unlived, utilizies many of the strategies used in assignment writing. Helwig mainly concentrates on anecdotes and how they relate to audience appeal, but he still includes the other strategies for assignment writing.

Anecdote's are frequently being used in Helwig's essay. Primarly, he explains his teaching career and his presentation of Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken: "I sometimes presented this poem to students", (Helwig 55). Secondly, he explains his first thoughts of his reflection of the ghost existence: "...when I first began to reflecton the ghost existences that haunt us, was something less painful", (55). Also, he talks about his ghost existence playing a role in his professional life, in which he turns down a singing opportunity: "I was offered a job as one of the professional soloist at a large church", (56). Following his decision to abandon a singing career he got a glimpse of what he turned down: "What happened, in my case, is that in later life I had a taste of things I had abandoned", (56).

Again, at the end of the essay he explains the extent to which the ghost life is existent: "The singer I did not become, the athlete or dancer or actor you did not become, have an existence of some sort", (57). Anecdotes strengthen the use of audience appeal factors in his essay by relating the idea of ghost existence to personal experiences, which everybody experiences throughout their lives. These ghost existences are at times expressed by Helwig to great extremes.

His metaphor of ghosts as the choices that are not taken are stretched to emphasize his vies. The style, in which he expresses these ghosts as being able to haunt us creates a hyperbole: "...and if our life is defined by the...