Form Meets Content

Ms. Valentino mentioned the idea of "form meets content" several times over the last few weeks and "Shooting Dad" appears to contain many instances in which the sentence structure and diction of the piece matches its content.

One of Vowell's purposes is to illustrate how truly similar she and her father are despite their differences in opinions regarding politics, guns, etc. As she describes her and her father's differences in the first half of the piece, the sentence structure seems to foreshadow her eventual realization that she and her father are more alike than she thinks. Vowell says "All he ever cared about were guns. All I ever cared about was art." The parallelism and repetition of the phrase "All he/I ever cared about" hints at their similarities. Despite the slight difference between the sentences at the end, guns vs. art, the majority of both sentences are the same. This indicates that both Vowell and her father are largely the same - both have an intense passion for their respective arts. The only difference between the two is what they're passionate about. Vowell later describes a similar situation when she writes "available flat surfaces were buried under a million scraps... available flat surfaces were buried under piles of staff paper". Again, Vowell repeats the beginning phrase, "available flat surfaces were buried under...", and leaves the end of the sentence to describe their differences. This parallelism and repetition serves to emphasize their likeness - like the sentence structure, the father-daughter pair parallel much of each other. The fact that their differences are forced to the end of these sentences reflect how their disagreements are relatively insignificant