so I'm going to read through the danger of a single story by Adichie this is in preparation for the English language exam this may come up for question four and question five please remember it is the exam board that chooses the text that you base your answer on so you need to know all the texts from that section in the anthology not just the ones you feel comfortable with so to start with the title the danger of a single story the use of the word danger foreshadows Adichie's main argument which is basically to say that it is extremely harmful to provide one narrative about a person or a culture and this can lead to a great misunderstanding off of different cultures so she this creates a cautionary tone which is important to keep in mind because at times her speech may seem light hearted as she uses a lot of humor but underlying all of that is a really important message that she wants you to take seriously she also uses the word story as a metaphor for stereotypes and what she's trying to do here is expose stereotypes for what she believes they are and that's fiction they're not based on evidence and that encourages us to to approach stories we might hear in the media for example with great skepticism it's a speech so please make sure you refer to the audience not the reader and you should be looking for many devices as well as ethos pathos and logos and the speech is informative because she's sharing her personal experiences but I think overall she's trying to persuade you to really reflect on your own actions and maybe your own perceptions of different cultures and where you get those ideas from and deciding what the or who the audience are and quite difficult the last time I checked her video had 15 or over 15 million views so that's a diverse audience I would say so long as you can speak English and have access to the Internet and you could be part of this audience so to start I'm a storyteller so we've got here a personal pronoun so that it immediately engages the audience we know that she's going to kind of share some personal stories and I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call the danger of the single story so here we know that the speech will be anecdotal and that gives it that light-hearted tone which we will see later but here she juxtaposes it with mentioning the title again the danger of the single story so this again creates that cautionary tone and just reminds the audience right at the beginning that this should be taken seriously I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria my mother says that I started reading at the age of two although I think four is probably close to the truth so here adichie establishes credibility because she's being really honest or she's being really modest and that just makes her more likable and the audience are more likely to listen and accept things that she says so I was an early reader and what I read were British and American children's books I was also an early writer and when I began to write attababy at about the age of seven stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading all my characters were white and blue-eyed they played in the snow they ate apples and they talked a lot about the weather how lovely it was that the Sun had come out oh there's a number of things that she does in this paragraph first of all she's using humor so for me this room mine's me of the terrible stories I used to write and make my mom read so again I've just personally I feel like I can relate to her and that makes them more likeable and she also uses listing and listing here and emphasizes the monotony of the type of stories that she was reading and how uninspiring they are but this list becomes more important as we read the next paragraph now this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria I had never been outside Nigeria we didn't have snow we ate mangos and we never talked about the weather because there was no need to so here Aditi juxtaposes these two paragraphs to highlight how different her life was in comparison to the stories that she was reading so really the stories that she was reading were the antithesis to her life so if you look at some examples we've got direct opposites be played in the snow we didn't have snow we they talked a lot about the weather we never talked about the weather and so this just shows direct opposites and just gives you an idea of how little she could relate to the stories she was reading what this demonstrates I think is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story particularly as children so notice that she's used emotive language here and so the tone is just becoming a bit more serious and she wants the audience to really reflect on kind of the harmfulness of these stories she also uses the collective pronoun way to encourage a sense of unity if you notice the paragraphs before she often uses the personal pronoun so from here on she's trying to encourage and this this sense of unity with the audience because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign I had become complete it's that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify now things change when I discovered African books there weren't many of them available and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books but because of writers like Chinua Achebe and camara Laye i went through a mental shift in in in my perception of literature i realized that people like me girls with skin the color of chocolate whose kinky hair could not form ponytails could also exist in literature I started to write about things I recognized so Adichie establishes credibility here as she references and African authors which just shows that she's well-read as well as and the fact that she's experienced literature from different cultures so she kind of has authority on this on this topic in some respects now I loved these American and British books I read I think it's really important that she does this because what what I mean by that is that she compliments the American and British books because she doesn't want to point the finger or accuse any author for trying to harm her in any way and that helps engage the audience because the odd the audience very well we'll have British and American people in them who may have read the same books and have loved them and so she doesn't want to kind of put off any member of the audience they stirred my imagination they opened up new worlds for me but the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature so careful language choice here unintended again she's trying to make sure that she doesn't sound bitter and she's not accusing anyone of anything and so that creates an empathetic tone she appreciates that although it was harmful for her no one intended that to happen so the discovery of African writers did for me was this it saved me from having a single story of what books are the use of the colon here draws importance to the following clause which is that stories saved her or African stories saved her I haven't highlighted it here but it be um it would be worth noting or underlining saved which is in contrast to the word danger so although she starts with saying that stories can be dangerous stories can also save you and so here she's just highlighting the great possibility stories have I come from a conventional middle-class Nigerian family my father was a professor my mother was an administrator and so we had as was the norm live-in domestic help who would often come from nearby rural villages so the year I turned 8 we got a new house boy his name was fede the only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor my mother sent yams and rice and our old clothes to his family and when I didn't finish my dinner my mother would say finish your food don't you know people like fides family have nothing so I felt enormous pity for fides family and so who use of dialogue here is humorous for me personally this reminds me of how my parents used to tell me off for not finishing my food and these always remind me that there are starving children out there so this makes Aditi more relatable to me and and therefore more likeable and here she's trying to highlight kind of shared experience that she had won one story about feed a and she'll move on to talk about how that led her to kind of misunderstand him and his family so just to note remember she said at the beginning that she is a storyteller and she does tell a story if you look at the time expressions then one Saturday we went to his village to visit and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made I was startled it had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something all I had heard about them was how poor they were so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor their poverty was my single story of them so here she's critiquing herself which is really important because she's trying to highlight that everyone can stereotype and she's putting her hands up and saying I've done this as well I've stereotyped v-day and so this makes the audience again more likely to listen to her because she's not just standing there pointing the finger at others she's including herself in this criticism years later I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States I was 19 my American roommate was shocked by me she asked where I had learned to speak English so well and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language she asked if she could listen to what she called my tribal music I was consequently very disappointed when I produce my tape of Mariah Carey if you've watched the video you'll note that the audience laughs at this point so again she's using humor and she's using the contrast of the roommates expectations of her that she would listen to tribal music with something very different to what she actually listens to which is Mariah Carey and that just helps emphasize how wrong on how misinformed her roommate was of her based on the little knowledge he had of Africa she assumed that I did not know how to use a stove this one I put shorts it's what I should have put there really is the one sentence paragraph helps reflect this limited view there's no need to go on this the roommates view is already very limited and so we'll move on what struck me was this she had she had felt sorry for me even before she saw me her default position toward me as an African was a kind of patronizing well-meaning pity he Adichie carefully selects her language again noticed that she includes their well-meaning to highlight that the roommate does not mean to to offend Adichie my roommate had a single story of Africa a single story of catastrophe so we have parallel sentence structure here typically when a parallel sentence structure is used it's to draw the attention to the one word that changes and in this Africa changes to catastrophe which suggests that the roommate saw Africa as synonymous with catastrophe and again it just highlights that limited view in this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way no possibility of feelings more complex than pity no possibility of a connection as human equals so after I had spent some years in the US as an African I began to understand my roommates responds to me if I had not grown up in Nigeria and all I knew about Africa were from popular images I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting senseless Wars dying of poverty and AIDS unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner I would see Africans in the same way that I as a child had seen fides family so notice how she's built her argument she started with her own personal experience of stories then her she has been guilty of stereotyping fides family to her personal experience of being stereotyped and she's brought all of that together to build an argument of how difficult it is to appreciate difference if you are only exposed to one narrative but I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story so here again she critiques herself which is important that she's just talked about her roommate and how offensive her roommate unintentionally was and then she brings it back to herself to harlot look I'm I'm guilty of this as well and again she's suggesting this shared responsibility a few years ago I visited Mexico from the US the political climate in the u.s. at the time was tense and there were debates going on about immigration and as often happens in America immigration became synonymous with Mexicans there were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system sneaking across the border being arrested at the border that sort of thing so look a language choice here we've got words such as fleecing and sneak which obviously just have negative connotations and but also what's interesting is how she ends that list with just that sort of thing so it's got quite a dismissive tone which suggests that she doesn't believe those things now that she realizes that really though they were a load of nonsense really I remember walking around my on my first day in Guadalajara I think you pronounced it that way watching the people going to work rolling up tortillas in the marketplace smoking laughing so she uses listing here to kind of highlight all the wonderful things that she saw the Mexicans and there it also offers a contrast to what she thought she expected to see them fleecing and sneaking and being arrested when actually she sees people working rolling up tortillas smoking and laughing and so it's a much more positive image in reality she also doesn't use a conjunction she could have used and at the between smoking and laughing and I think this is really important for her message because she's saying that the list is endless that that doesn't sum up the Mexican people she could go on and on and on I remember first feeling slight surprise and then I was overwhelmed with shame I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind the abject immigrant I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself and I think the use of the phrasal verb he bought into is really important because I think she's suggesting here that we all have a choice she chose to buy into that she's not saying I was tricked into thinking this she's saying she bought into it so there's a certain element of responsibility there and because she takes on responsibility for her actions I think it encourages the audience to stop thinking about the way they might different cultures and reflect on how they've chosen to to buy into maybe media coverage of different cultures so that is how to create a single story show a people as one thing as only one thing over and over again and that is what they become we've got use of repetition here for one thing and over and over which really sub emphasizes that this is a cultural problem it's something that that repeats itself and that's where kind of the cautionary tone comes from and that this is an issue that Adichie thinks needs to be faced and and dealt with stories matter many stories matter stories have been used to dispossessed and to malign but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize stories can break the dignity of a people but stories can also repair that broken dignity so this links back to what we were talking about before with use using the word saved how stories saved her there also they can be dangerous but they can also save her and again adichie here emphasizes the great possibility with stories so all those stories can dis possess they can also empower and humanize people they can write the dignity of people but they can also repair that broken dignity and so she's just emphasizing here the great possibility with stories if they are told correctly the American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her southern relatives who had moved to the north she introduced them to a book about southern life that they had left behind they sat around reading the book themselves listening to me read the book and a kind of paradise was regained I would like to end with this thought that when we reject the single-story when we realized that there is never a single story about any place we regain a kind of paradise so we have the repetition of when we and so again she's using the collective pronoun to highlight the shared responsibility and and also the repetition of Paradise as well which again is in contrast to the danger of this single story again emphasizing that stories can have positive a positive impact so just a reminder question for should be easy to prepare for because it almost always about thoughts and feelings off the writer so before you enter an exam you really should think about the types of thoughts and feelings that are in each text so that should be an easy one to answer or at least one that you shouldn't have to spend that much time this just gives you an example of the plan that you could have as part of your revision notes by there's no reason why you should have exactly the same as what I've just suggested here this is just an example and there are so many techniques used but you don't need to use the same examples that are on the board on the presentation but I would take some time to really think about three or four paragraphs that you could write about Adichie's thoughts and feelings