Music is a powerful thing, it creates emotions, it brings people together, it can even make a bad time feel like a good time. Music is everywhere, whether it be someone listening to it on their phone or a toddler banging pots and pans with a spoon like he is a professional drummer. Although music brings joy and happiness to many people it can also affect people in an unpleasant way. This is because of earworms or brainworms as some call them, these are catchy pieces of music that continually repeats through a person's mind after it is no longer playing. In Musicophilia Oliver Sacks applies many great rhetorical devices throughout his writing to teach his readers about these strange brainworms. Sacks includes many powerful anecdotes about people's’ …show more content…
Just like the repetition of music caused by brainworms Sacks repeats words and phrases to again teach the readers about brainworms. “After reading EEGs intently for several hours, I may stop because I start seeing EEG squiggles all over the walls and ceiling. After driving all day, I may see fields and hedgerows and trees moving past me in a steady stream, keeping me awake at night. After a day on a boat, I feel the rocking for hours after I am back on dry land.” (Sacks, 126). Like one of Sacks anecdotes this anaphora doesn’t directly talk about brainworms but still has a lot of information that pertains to them. In all of the sentences it talks about the effects after doing something and how it feels as if it is still happening, this is applicable to brainworms because that is basically what they are. Brainworms appear when you listen to music and then that music repeats itself even when you aren’t listening to it. “With incessant repetition, it soon lost its charm, its lilt, its musicality and its meaning. It intervened with his schoolwork, his thinking, his peace of mind, his sleep.” (Sacks, 22). This has two examples of anaphora and they both work together perfectly and create a nice flow in Sacks writing. The first talks about the start of the brainworms and then the second example talks about how the person was affected by them. The anaphoras created by Sacks support his purpose in his writing by repeating the point that he wants the readers to