Annie Dillard's essay, "Living like Weasels" gives one a new approach on life, through the eyes of an animal. She showed that sometimes, the way an animal acted should be followed by humans. In this case, the stubbornness of the weasel was something humans could try and follow. She tells the audience of her experience, describing each detail beautifully, allowing the reader to envision her scene. The way Dillard composed her essay, drawing in the reader through self-reflection and comparison, gives the reader a personal approach to the subject. .
To lead the reader through her experience to her conclusion on the subject, Dillard's essay can be divided into four separate sections: paragraphs one and two, three to seven, eight to thirteen, and fourteen to seventeen. In the first section, she talked about the weasel, telling of their stubborn disposition. She then took the reader into why she was bothering with the background information of the weasels by tying in her personal experience. As she transitioned from the second to the third section, Dillard went from describing the scene to describing the experience in her mind. This took the reader through her thoughts, and in section four, it combined her thoughts to her conclusions on the weasels and life, noting that humans should sometimes take after the weasels, "grasp your one necessity, and not let go." In this series of sections, the reader can clearly see the thought process of the writer. If the organization was changed, the ideas wouldn't lead to the conclusion as well.
Dillard's style of conveying her idea through her disparate arrangement of words provided the reader with a new way of thinking. It can be seen through each of her paragraphs that she loosely followed a uniform structure in each paragraph to give her writing a better development. She first started off with short abrupt sentences that strengthened her main body in the paragraph.
