Dan Koeppel challenges popular belief that you will die if you fall out of an airplane in his process analysis “Taking a Fall.” Koeppel is a journalist and outdoors enthusiast, best known for his knowledge of extreme sports. In “Taking a Fall” Koeppel is instructing the reader on how to survive a long fall out of an airplane. Koeppel explains that there are two ways that you may fall out of an airplane, either free-falling or as a wreckage rider. Koeppel does a fantastic job grabbing and holding on to our attention of something that is extremely frightful, even though most people will never experience falling from thirty-five thousand feet. During Koeppel’s analysis he uses descriptive writing, anecdotes, and second person.
Descriptive writing is the clear description of a character, an event, or a place with great detail. “To slow your descent, emulate a skydiver. Spread your arms and legs, present your chest to the ground, and arch your back and head upward” (283). This is how Koeppel tells us to slow our body speed down before we prepare to land. Using descriptive writing during this situation helps us better understand how to position our body. A person could think that a skydiver may free-fall like a pencil instead of being all sprawled out like a starfish. Which in this case, would not help us slow down at all. Descriptive language helps the reader form images in their minds rather than just reading on through without paying close attention. Koeppel uses descriptive writing many times during “Taking a Fall” and makes me want to keep reading.
Koeppel is using anecdotes in “Taking a Fall.” Doing so gives us hope, that if we are ever in the situation where we are falling out of an airplane at thirty-five thousand feet, we may survive just as other survivors have.
In 1972 a Serbian flight attendant, Vesna Vulovic, was traveling in a DC-9 over Czechoslovakia when it blew up. She fell 33,000 feet, wedged between her seat, a catering trolley, a section of aircraft, and the body of another crew member, landing on – then sliding down – a snowy incline before coming to a stop, severely injured but alive (282).
The use of anecdotes in this analysis helps us form a trusting relationship with Koeppel so that we may believe that we can survive the fall from an airplane, against all odds. It gives us a sense of security knowing that someone else has survived such an unbelievable situation. The anecdotes used in “Taking a Fall” gives me more interest of this catastrophic situation and proves to me that you can fall from an airplane as a wreckage rider and survive.
Lastly Koeppel uses second person when giving us this process analysis, although many writers choose not to do so because it is not the way we talk and can make the reader feel uncomfortable. Using second person when writing makes the reader feel as if you are talking to them directly. “You’ll be unconscious soon, and you’ll cannonball at least a mile before waking up again” (281). Telling the reader that they are falling out of an airplane and will be unconscious soon can make them feel extremely uneasy. Yet Koeppel still grabs my attention in doing so. I wanted to keep reading to find out what would happen to me next. Writing in second person really affects the reader and creates a relationship between the reader and Dan Koeppel. It made it easy to imagine Koeppel talking directly to me instead of talking at me.
