Evening Parties

Dear Evi,
How are you? Unfortunately you missed the class on Wednesday, but don’t worry about it because this summary will clarify what we've studied. I hope that you're feeling better and it would be great to see you soon.
This week, we focused on an essay written by Rose Macaulay, the title of which is “Evening Parties”.
Firstly, the subject of the essay is parties. She successfully managed to introduce the topic through a couple of questions. Then, she provided us with the reasons, as to why we consider it important to attend parties, by using semicolons - which make her essay more interesting.
Moreover, the whole main body consists of a variety of sentences, which in effect mock people who like going to parties. The language that the author used, is complex and the tone is rather caustic. This is purposely done as a means of emphasizing dominant images and metaphors ; in a sarcastic way. For instance, in the 1st paragraph, Macaulay implies that we visit parties simply to fill our stomach with free food (that somebody else paid for). She is thoroughly ironic when stating the phrases "at someone else’s expense" and "elegant food about the palate." I believe that the author employs this technique so as to convince us that people go to parties since alike animals they have gregarious instincts and in addition to this their weak character means that they are influenced by social conventions. The author feels that some people enjoy the food more than the actual party, since they don't other to talk to anyone and just spend time alone by standing in a 'solitary' position and greedily scoffing down bits and pieces - if they were lucky enough to be offered any that is. Macaulay used the method of juxtaposition when describing humans beings who belong to the civilized world, as animals.
It seems as though the author takes the mickey out of her own essay, since she mentions that “not I do not enjoy the parties” in her closing sentence. In some way or another, she is probably playing with our feelings or fooling us. She presents the reader with an elaborate discussion about the notion of party-going, which obviously amuses him/her. However, Macaulay's composition is brought to an abrupt end, due to the fact that it does not have any conclusion whatsoever.
During Wednesday's lesson, James showed us a useful way of planning our essay, so as to make it more specific. He advised us to write down the word smell and then draw a circle, which we were suppose to divide into several parts. Next, each of had to write down as many elements as we could, which were directly related to the main word or category. Eventually, we took the idea or element thatch interested us most and once again drew another circle - inside which we wrote a number of points. We can do this particular procedure until we narrow down the subject of our essay and determine the ideal one ; which in due turn will hopefully become the recourse of our thesis statement and its supporting (body) paragraphs.