TOW #23 - "What You Learn in College"

This week I read a piece of creative nonfiction written by Karen Donley-Hayes to reminisce about her college days and the underlying sadness and anxiety of the memories of parties she attended. As she gets more and more into her story, she speaks directly to the audience and uses a form of anaphora to express these hidden feelings, which I found to be very effective.
Donley-Hayes squeezes in her anaphora between each paragraph (for a few paragraphs) as she relays an uncomfortable memory of her and her classmates playing a game of drunken strip-spin-the-bottle. This form of anaphora involved the repetition of an entire sentence, rather than the beginning word of a sentence. She writes "The bottle spins." After each paragraph with the start of the next paragraph expressing an increasing level of uncomfortableness and anxiety. Not only does this show the author's emotions in this memory, it projects them onto the reader and allows them to experience the same feelings she did in that memory. This was an effective way to tell her story because it allows readers to quickly identify the purpose that Donley-Hayes is trying to convey. She wants to show how not all 'going-out' nights in college are going to be good ones, especially if you are surrounded by people you do not trust, or have stepped out of your comfort zone.
Besides this projection of emotions onto her readers, the author also speaks directly to the audience by using pronouns like 'you' and 'we' when describing her reactions to reliving these uncomfortable memories. She ends her essay with a pondering, "But the regret isn't gone. It will never be gone, and you don't need to learn that. You already know it." By speaking to her readers this way, she is instilling a sense of personal attachment to her own memory, making it more likely for her purpose and argument to resonate with them. In other words, even though the readers did not experience these memories firsthand, they are still able to, through empathy, understand how/why the author felt the way she did during her own experience.