To Get a Story, “I FlimFlammed A Dead Man’s Mother” is a personal short story written by Bob Teague. The short story is about a local tv news reporter, who talks about how the job can be quite ruthless and requires your heart to be able to endure the sorrow. He mentions that depending on the story it decides how much you have to bend the truth just to get a decent story for the news. When the author states “if you are covering a political campaign, you must goad the candidates into spitting obscenities at each other”, it intensifies the whole idea as he must provoke the people to get a story. The essay I am about to write will explore the ideas of how the author uses tone, diction and sentence patterns to add to the story to bring it alive for the reader.
Through the authors’ implementations of diction he amplifies the feeling of reality the reader gets to enjoy. While first starting off with a pessimistic yet upswing tone, chills run through the readers body when the author says “Even when you feel that you are doing something disgusting, or merely in bad taste”. The author follows up by adding the point that you “have to hang tough” as it is one of the duties of a news reporter. The narrator manages to leave a distaste in your mouth like an empty metallic feeling and your stomach drops to the floor because of the word choices Teague had made.
The tone in the story is quite morbid and depressing but it makes the reader feel engaged, because the author is so concise and so realistic. The authors thoughts are portrayed through how our society takes the news and how it revolves around negativity. Even though people feel pain through sorrow it can form a greater sense of community in people, and ...
