If you happen to have a 2013 edition The Best American Essays, please open to Richard Schmitt’s Sometimes a Romantic Notion on page 27. In this narrative, Schmitt wants to lead those who think there is a way to face reality and get rid all of the nonsense illusions to realize that we are living in a world surrounded by dreams and hopes. We will never know what it is until we try it ourselves. Mr. Schmitt conveys such idea by walking the readers through the story of a narrator who runs away from home, joins a circus, and becomes a professor. What makes this essay so interesting and fascinating to read is Schmitt’s ability to control the character, to create doubt and to twist the narrator around that make the readers want to discover more about this …show more content…
Rather than directly dive into the story, Schmitt chooses to catch readers’ attention by creating an argument. Often, we hear people saying someone “runs of” from school as if using “runs off” to signify “the escape from reality,” and we often use the same phrase when describing someone who joins the circus. However, the narrator is making a claim that such thing is false and his argument seems reasonable through the way he talks to the readers. Starting from page 27 to 29, we see Schmitt uses a lot of short sentences and simple sentence beginnings that usually starts with “I verb,” and ends with two to three objects following the subject being mentioned. For example, “It was not romantic…I saw the Ringling Bros…The train was white. The train yard back. I was a brick washer then…the minimum wage was $1.60 an hour” (27-28). This use of succinct but powerful sentences not only sets up the tone