My Watch, A True Story, By Muriel Spark
It is essential to understand the importance of analyzing essays and their criteria. One must learn how to not only analyze an essay to develop an understanding of the authors's prose, but to also develop their own writing skills.
Applying the criteria to My Watch, A True Story, by Muriel Spark, one will learn an accurate understanding of the audience, purpose, content, organization, development, tone/voice, and the style/ diction.
Being one of the most important criteria in order to understand an essay, one must first determine the audience. In the case of the Spark's essay, its understood that it was read by the audience, but was the gradation of the application grasped?
First, one might look at the purpose of the essay to simply describe a story of a watch, and how it managed to take a rollercoaster ride of tragedies in the hands of Spark. However, taking a deeper look into this heart felt story, one will understand how a simple piece of jewelry managed to become a sentimental treasure and an "old friend" (2).
Equally important is the content. In the first paragraphs, Spark began to tell the story of how, and why she obtained this watch. Buying it solely to carry on her tradition of buying a jewel for each book she publishes. Not long after her new purchase, already gaining a degree of affection for her watch, she moved to Italy. Being that it was a "tumultuous time" (1) in the late seventies, she placed it in the bank along with her other small valuables as advised. Thinking it was in safe keeping, trouble managed to find the watch when the banks vaults flooded. After retrieving her watch from the "mud-filled safe" (1), she realized that her watch had suffered greatly. Luckily, after taking it to an antique jeweler, the watch was repaired back and happily back on her wrist, though it no longer had all (emphasis mine) its original pieces. At length, twenty years later, spark noticed a missing diamond. Without...
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