Persuasion- Joan Didion

          In Joan Didion’s essay “Los Angeles Notebook,” she talks about a wind that is powerful but also deadly. Didion conveys her view of the Santa Ana wind through imagery and selection of detail as well as the structure and tone she sets up.

          Didion starts off the opening with “uneasy” and that tells the reader that the tone will be gloomy while having “some tension.” Then she states her reason by using imagery such as “... a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the cajon and San Gorgonio passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, trying the hills and the nerves to the flash point.” Didion tells the audience about the wind with selection of detail too. Simple words like hot has a great effect because small words like wind is actually something big. She later talks about peacocks screaming in the olive trees which create an ominous feeling.

          The author then uses an anecdote to explain the Santa Ana wind and when she experienced it. In the anecdote, the writer talks about a neighbor she had. “The heat was surreal… My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days and there were no lights at night…” The ominous tone that she sets up using her neighbor was to emphasize that the Santa Ana causes “depression” and “nervousness.” “[the neighbor’s] husband roamed the place with a machete, it lets ts the reader know that this person is anxious and nervous about something. Also if the husband heard “ a trespasser, the next [day] a rattlesnake” that displays the husband as paranoid. On top of all this the “Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period.” The wind drove the Indians to kill themselves by going into the Pacific. This can mean that the depression or something in their minds was put into their minds by the Santa Ana.

When the author uses diction like “anything can happen” in an ominous tone, the audience feels uncomfortable and cautious. The choice of words she uses indicates that the Santa Ana causes depression and suicidal thoughts. The author tell the readers several examples how the Santa Ana turns the people into something they are not to convey her message. The “children become unmanageable” and “the suicide rate goes up.” The foen also causes the same effects towards the people of the city in Austria and Switzerland. The structure that the author is using provides multiple evidences to how the Santa Ana affects the people of the country.

          There is also scientific evidence like “ the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms is make people unhappy.” The author uses evidence from multiple views to convey her message to many different types of people.

          Joan Didion used multiple rhetorical devices to emit her view of the Santa Ana by using imagery, selection of detail, the structure, and the ominous tone. The Santa Ana is a wind that causes depression which can lead to chaos. She shows her readers that the mysterious yet evil characteristics of the wind.