Take the Plunge

What is the Emerson’s purpose in writing?

Gloria Emerson is a reputed journalist and she worked as a foreign correspondent for a newspaper. This is the quality of her writing that impresses the readers most and attracts them magically. She does not reveal her purpose directly. It is her style of description and her viewpoint that fascinates the readers and reveals to them the real purpose of writing. 

She wishes to get some novel achievement through her wonderful performance. She wanted to glorify the women as capable of doing manly jobs of courage. Everyone at the parachuting training centre was pleased as well as surprised at her successful experience. It was the purpose of her writing this essay so as to let her readers also share her pleasure. She describe her purpose in the end of the essay when she says,“Everyone at the centre was pleased. In fact I am sure, they were surprised perhaps this is what I had in mind all the time”.

How does she maintain the focus on her feelings through out the essay do these feelings change?

Take the plunge inspiring expression of her feelings and unique description of her exciting experience. She focuses her attention upon her feelings and facts closely follow them. Her feeling go on changing because every human being as a hope to rise and fear to fall. She feels her fear of being electrocuted on high tension wires shamed on the roof, drowned in water or hanged in a tree. 

Then she admit her feelings of fear by telling us how the drillmaster could no hear all that she shouted angrily at him and how the removed her trembling arms from his back when she yelled “Go” finally she expresses her feelings how everyone at the centre was pleased and surprised at her parachuting success. This is how she maintains the focus on her feeling throughout the essay.