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,
gets a different set of lunch items than hers. She watches him walk away to his group and after he throws a Ho-Ho at someone, she gets smacked in the chest by mashed potatoes. While Basketball Pole tries to apologize, she runs out and is caught by Mr. Neck, who gives her a demerit for walking the halls without a pass, even though she has a stain from a glob of mashed potatoes on her shirt. Overall, the voice in these two excerpts are weighted very differently.
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
story. Imagery in “Eleven” makes us feel that we are actually in Rachel’s shoes, or at least in the same classroom, as the way the whole excerpt is written is bringing back sympathetic nolstalgia of being young, like Rachel, and having no idea of what to do in situations of confrontation. “Spotlight” has imagery that makes you feel more empathy that sympathy for the girl, as us ourselves have not been put in the same ordeal as she has, but you can imagine what it has been like for her to go through some an embarrassing and humiliating experience. Along with Imagery, there is also the last part of voice, which is Tone. The tone in “Eleven” is childish and almost immature in a way that an 11-year-old shouldn’t be handling things. But, the tone of “Spotlight” has a very dramatic tone, which is evasive, nervous, and filled with anxiousness, like the girl is showing us that she doesn’t know what will happen next. Therefore, the comparison between “Eleven” and “Spotlight” is very different in voice, as both of them have reoccuring themes, but the way there are put together can make the reader feel absolute different emotions and have contrasting ideas for both of the pieces.