Joan Didion

Joan Didion's opening paragraphs describe her knowledge of the Santa Ana winds of California. Joan's view on the Santa Ana winds seems to be negative and informative, even though she states that this occurrence usually seems to create certain disturbances in the world. She conveys this view using a fair amount of good diction, structure and selection of detail. 

Most of the words that Joan uses to describe what a Santa Ana is, and what it does, are seen to have been carefully selected by her. She uses words that aren't normally seen or read by the public, as well as a translation to another language. "The baby frets. The maid sulks." Her writing sounds well composed, at this point, and further throughout the paragraph it seems that Joan's looking negatively on the matter of a Santa Ana. She uses the word "foehn", which means strong wind. She writes of fights, suicide, nervousness, depression and more words with negative connotations that, again, are showing a negative perspective. This is even more clearly seen in the last few sentences; one in particular showing the change in the ratio of positive to negative ions becoming "unusually high". Joan ends her introductory paragraphs with, "in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy which is what the high ratio of positive to negative ions means." With this being said, you could only assume that the Santa Ana winds are not appreciated or looked on happily and positively by the writer. 

Joan's structure of her paragraphs also helps with conveying her negative view on a Santa Ana. Right off the bat, she writes of an "uneasy" tension that is physically felt by the people, as a whole, of Los Angeles. She says that it is "impossible" for a Santa Ana to be predicted, but that is not true in terms of what can be felt by the inhabitants of the complicated city of Los Angeles. The next paragraph continues as an anecdote Joan shares of her first knowledge of a Santa Ana, when she had first moved to the City of Angels. The bad effects of the winds were told to her by neighbors, and she then had experienced them for herself. She follows this paragraph, and ends with, one on all of the terrible aftermaths of a Santa Ana and a foehn, with the main effect being, simply put, happiness. As Joan writes of the bad effects of a Santa Ana, with proceeding to worse and ending with the worst effects, showing that these winds are something that she doesn't view as pleasant and, therefore, negatively.

Lastly, her view is helped seen by her selection of detail. Joan chooses to write about the Santa Anas using descriptive and detailed words that further explain to the readers the effecys and occurrence of a Santa Ana. She chooses to write saying," To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior." and "What an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is makes people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that." Her multiple usage of the word mechanistic is what finally conveys her negative view on the Santa Ana winds.