Life of Pi

In my book, the Life of Pi, the author uses all of the grammar and sentence changes we have learned so far. The author starts out talking about Pi’s life and how he grew up with a more religious family. This ends up being his major in college. He had just started his second year in college. The author surely feels that he needs to give information in the first few chapters, especially because we as readers know nothing about Pi. The author uses sentence branches, dashes, commas, semi-colons, paragraphs, and word extension all in the first two chapters. He uses this to inform the reader. The sentence branches give the extra information usually needed for small details.
In the next few paragraphs the author starts to go into Pi’s life in true detail, starting with his life in school, and all the people there that he meets. This chapter he uses paragraphs a lot, every four to nine sentences. But as I noticed he writes out numbers instead of using the symbol. I learned this in my language arts class at the beginning of the year and I had never been told that before. It is more useful and it is easier to read I think. Then the author continues on to a short chapter. This confused me but later on I realized why. It was a short chapter, about two paragraphs of a letter that was written. This letter also used the semi-colon, but not to much else.
Another thing I noticed in the first half of my book, after they went into detail about Pi’s life, there was a lot of dialogue between Pi, his teachers and new friends. Most authors use this but it is a good strategy to show the reader what is happening. When you use dialogue the paragraphs are usually shorter, because after every speaker, a new paragraph is formed.