Eleven And Spotlight, By Sandra Cisneros

“Eleven” and “Spotlight” are quite similar in style, but not in voice. They may have the same revolving theme of mean teachers and breakdowns, but the tones they take and even the sentence structure they have is completely different. “Eleven” is a story by Sandra Cisneros, which is about a girl named Rachel and an ugly red sweater. While in class, Rachel’s teacher is asking the class whose red sweater it is. Rachel is seemingly the only one in class that doesn’t say that it’s hers, which makes one of her classmates, whom she calls stupid Sylvia Saldívar, say that it’s Rachel’s. Rachel is forced to put on the sweater and starts to have a crying fit, feeling like she was three years old again, due to her saying that when you’re eleven, you carry all your previous years (ten, nine, eight, etc.) with you, and the fact that it was her birthday that day didn’t really help her anyway. Finally, another classmate speaks up and says that it’s hers, which lets Rachel take off the sweater in relief and stops her breakdown. “Spotlight” is an excerpt from a novel called “Speak”. This piece centers around a girl who is seemingly at lunch, but isn’t planning to sit with anyone. Actually, she is standing in the lunch line depicting where she will avoid people that day. She notices a boy, whom she calls Basketball Pole, and sees how, even without words,
While the Diction in “Eleven” is very percise, repeatedly saying words like “not mine” and many cutoffs by Rachel, “Spotlight” uses a more relaxed, almost teenage-ish word choice, which is understandable, as it is coming from a teenager itself. With Syntax, the structure of “Eleven” is more centered around one particular subject, which is Rachel’s whole experience with the sweater. On the other hand, the structure in “Spotlight” has a bit of exposition missing which leaves some wondering about why the author chose to put certain sentences into the