I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (odyssey video)

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou's memoir of growing up as a southern black woman in the 1930s Chapter 1 introduces us to: Momma (actually her grandmother) the store she owns Stamps, Arkansas, where Marguerite (Maya) and her brother are sent by her divorcing parents to be raised. Angelou's diction relies on figures of speech and comparisons to paint a picture for us not only of what took place, but what it felt like. Diction: the choice and arrangement of words for clarity and effectiveness

Angelou uses specific diction that gives us mental pictures to describe the events that take place at early morning and late afternoon. She uses less specific diction to give us her feelings about those actions. She uses metaphors to compare the light at morning and late afternoon with the mood of the work. The following images are of laborers picking cotton in the South in the late 1800s and early 1900s how close do her word pictures match the feeling in the real photos? (odyssey slide)

Shifting narrative point of view Shifting narrative point of view (odyssey) In a memoir or autobiography, because the aim is to provide deeper meaning or a lesson learned, writers frequently shift their narrative point of view from telling the events as if they were happening right now, which is called immediacy, to telling what they now think about the events from a more mature perspective (odyssey video)