Revised Small Stakes Writing

Jacob Lewis

English 1102

Writing that moves you

                One of my favorite bands is a group called Rise Against. I like their music because almost all of their songs has some sort of message about life or about the actual truth of things. My quote is from one of their newest songs, Satellite, off the CD Endgame.

“You can’t fill your cup until you empty all it has

You can’t understand what lies ahead

If you don’t understand the past

You’ll never learn to fly now

Till your standing at the cliff

And you can’t truly love, until you've given up on it.”

                I really like this quote because it says a lot about a wide range of topics in life such as, love, commitment, trust, and new and old ideas. The first line of text is more or less saying that you can’t start something if you haven’t finished what you’re already working on. Say you half a cup full of milk, then before your done drinking it you try and put some soda in there. Well that wouldn’t taste too good. The same with things in life, if you try and do too much everything gets mixed up and what could be good is ruined because of what you haven’t finished.

                The second and third lines have a message about the past. It’s trying to say that you should use your knowledge and experiences from the past to be able to work better in the future. Plus, like another old saying goes “If you don’t know where you came from, you can’t possibly know where you’re going.”

The fourth and fifth lines talk about commitment. No one actually learns how to do something by reading about it and watching others do it. To truly be able to grasp a concept or ability one must be do it themselves. People must make the commitment when they really want something that they have to go and “throw themselves off the cliff” so that they can truly earn what it is they are searching for.

                The last line does talk about love in one sense. It is also talking about possession. Nowadays smaller children are just given these nice new things without them doing anything to earn them. I know back when I was little I had to do work to earn money to buy my own toys, or I waited till my birthday or Christmas to get it. Now people have no sense of value though. They just throw their new iPhones around like they’re indestructible or something. What this quote is trying to say is that you really don’t know what you have until it’s gone. Once you lose something, such as love as the quote says, you find out how truly important it is to you and how much it affects your life.

                The author, Tim McIIrath, uses a few different stylistic intricacies in this quote. One thing that I noticed was that the first and last line of it has one idea on one line, while the four middle lines have two ideas on two lines each. This gives the quote a little bit of a pattern which makes it easier to say, which makes sense, since this is a song. He also puts opposite ideas together in antithesis to reinforce the ideas that he’s trying to push forward. 

Reflection for Writing that moves you.

I really liked this assignment it was actually enjoyable to do because I got to choose my own piece of work and analyze the meaning behind the words. I really got to express myself and what I thought one of my favorite songs meant for a grade.  It was a pretty easy assignment really but it meant a lot to me because it was on a piece that I already enjoyed. It also helped me start get in to the mode of finding rhetorical devices and seeing how those can greatly improve a pieces impact on an individual.