"Leave me alone!" "You don't understand me!" "This is a different century; things are way different than they were back then." "You don't understand the situation!" These are the many quotes and statements made by many adolescents today to adults and/or parents when it comes to their life. Though all adults have experience the trials of becoming who they are today, young people, now a days, feel that they are alone in the world and the only people who could genuinely understand them are themselves or other teens. Sometimes, it is necessarily true that parents do not understand their teens though they think they do since they were once teen themselves. But not all the time, the problems teens face today are the same as they were back in the days. To get a true perceptive, it's best to take that step out of the box and into the mind of the adolescent to see life through their eyes. These literary works "Reflections of a Seventeen-Year-Old" by Sylvia Platt and Slam, Dunk, & Hook by Yusef Komunyakaa, were able to portray the experience of life through the eyes of a young person by using the rhetorical devices of symbolism, imagery, and point of view. .
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In the passage, "Reflections of a Seventeen-Year-Old" by Sylvia Platt, the narrator of the passage portrays her desire to be free and the feeling she feel of becoming free. She uses imagery to distill within the readers" head the image of a peaceful and neutral room to fit her liberated behavior. "It is a room suited to me-tailored, uncluttered, and peaceful I love the quiet lines of the furniture, the two bookcases filled with poetry books and fairy tales saved from childhood." On the other hand, in the poem, Slam, Dunk,& Hook by Yusef Komunyakaa uses imagery to convey motion. Motion that shows the players control over the basketball court and the way they move. "We out maneuvered the footwork of bad angels. Nothing but a box swish of strings like silk.