“Two Meals”

The essay of Virginia Woolf, “Two Meals”, is about a woman who goes and experiences two very separate and distinct universities. The first of which is an all boys university, and the second, an all girls university. Throughout the work you notice two contrasting settings. The first is a charming dinner with exquisite food, the second, a bland and simple meal. Woolf uses different forms of syntax that help the reader more fully understand her perception and thoughts of these two places. She uses very forward diction with long and drawn out sentences in the first paragraph, but in the second paragraph the diction is more harsh with choppy sentences. Woolf also uses imagery to help describe the meals and settings that she is experiencing. The writing is also organized in way that displays two paragraphs; these two paragraphs contain two conflicting ideas and feelings. The author structured her writing like this to help the reader isolate their reading, this way they are able to pick out certain details more easily. This essay is an …show more content…
If the reader didn’t know that and thought that the author was simply comparing two meals, then they did not know how to pick out syntax, observe vocabulary or small details. The reason that this was such a great example for syntax is because it is so eloquently placed and used. Woolf knew exactly what she was doing when she wrote and constructed this essay. The syntax she used gave meaning to her sentences, words and phrases that she chose to use. In this particular essay, this syntax was used to convey a certain response and a deeper meaning. The deeper meaning that was conveyed was feminism and inequality. It is plain and simple, without the knowledge of these words and rules, readers would have quite a hard time coming to that conclusion on their