AP Language and Literature Reader

2013-2014
Short Passages for Analysis compiled by Richard Nordquist
Other assorted AP Materials compiled by Mr. Nelson

Harrison Preparatory School

8800 121st St.
Lakewood, WA 98498
 Table of Contents
Introduction to Rhetoric – 3 Examples and Statistics – Stephen Jay Gould - 52
Rhetorical Theory – 3 Explanation – Barbara Ehrenriech - 53
Rhetorical Strategies: Logos, Ethos, Pathos – 3 Extended Definition – Carol Bly - 54
Glossary of Rhetorical Strategies – 97-109 Extended Definition – John Berger - 55
Logical Fallacies – 5 Extended Definition – Sidney J. Harris - 56
Modes of Discourse – 6 Extended Metaphor – Susan Orlean - 57
Toulmin Structure of Argument – 7-8 Fragmented Invective – J.M. Coetzee - 58
How to Interrogate Texts 9-10 Historical Present Tense – Frank McCourt - 59
Strategies for Analytical Reading – 11 Hyperbole, Circumlocution – S.J. Perelman - 60
Grammar GAG sheet – 12 Hyperbole – Dave Berry - 61
DIDLS – Graphic Organizer and Reading Strategy – 13 Hyperbolic Prose Style – Martin Amis - 62
SOAPSTone – Graphic Organizer and Reading Strategy – 14 Hypotactic Structure – James Baldwin - 63
Generic Rhetorical Analysis Rubric - 15 Impressions – Harry Crews - 64
Absolutes and Participial Phrases – Irwin Shaw - 16 Interior Monologue – Kinky Friedman - 65
Analogies – David Simon - 17 Lists – Joyce Johnson - 66
Anaphora – Bill Bryson - 18 Lists and Anaphora – Nikki Giovanni - 67
Appositive and Absolute Phrases – Frank Conroy - 19 Narration – Graham Greene - 68
Appositives – Alexander Theroux - 20 Narration – James Weldon Johnson – 69
Argument – Stephen Fry - 21 Narrative – Taber Colby - 70
Artful Playfulness – Ian Frazier - 22 Narrative Description – Bill Barich - 71
Attention to Detail – Nicholas Baker - 23 Narrative Report – John Hersey - 72
Baroque and Euphonic Language – Pat Conroy - 24 Narrative Sketch – Evan S. Connell - 72
Cause and Effect – Loren Eiseley - 25 Observation – F. Scott Fitzgerald - 74
Cause and Effect – Stephen King - 26 Onomatopoeia – William H Gass - 75
Character Sketch – John McPhee - 27 Paralepsis – Robert Benchley - 76
Classification – Richard Ford - 28 Parataxis – John Steinbeck - 77
Colloquial Flavor – Jack Keroac - 29 Parenthetical Details – Truman Capote - 78
Comparison – Anthony Lane - 30 Participial Phrases – M. Scott Momaday - 79
Comparison – Gretel Ehrlich - 31 Personification – Johnathan Lethem - 80
Comparison – Laurie Lee - 32 Point of View – E.L. Doctorow - 81
Contrast and Hyperbole – Jean Shepherd - 33 Polysyndeton – John Didion - 82
Coordination – Joseph O-Neill - 34 Polysyndeton – Julie Myerson - 83
Cumulative Sentences – George Saunders - 35 Process Analysis – Barry Lopez - 84
Definition – Julian Barnes - 36 Process Analysis – Joseph Heller - 85
Describing Ritual – Ray Bradbury - 37 Process Analysis – Wendell Berry - 86
Description – Edward Hoagland - 38 Prose Style – Raymond Chandler – 87-88
Description – Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston - 39 Reasons and Examples – Paul Fussell - 89
Description – John Lahr - 40 Reference – Margaret Drabble - 90
Description – Langston Hughes – 41 Repetition – Ernest Hemmingway - 91
Description – Maya Angelou - 42 Repetition – Russell Baker - 92
Description – David Sedaris - 43 Sarcasm – Fran Lebowitz - 92
Description – Pete Hamill - 44 Sentence Variety – Gilbert Highet - 93
Description – William Least Heat-Moon - 45 Subordination – Bernard Malamud - 94
Description and Exp. – Thomas McGuane - 46 Verb Style – Annie Dillard - 95
Details – Theodore Dreiser - 47 Voice – Saul Bellow - 96
Discourse – Bernard Levin - 48 Rhetorical Terms Glossary 97-109
Encomium – William Golding – 49 Tone Vocabulary 110-111
Ethopoeia – George Orwell - 50 AP Caliber Words - 112
Examples – Joseph Epstein - 51 Words to Describe Syntax - 112

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Introduction to RHETORIC

In this course you will enhance your ability to think logically and write persuasively by learning the foundations of
rhetoric and the skills of writing argumentation. Students should first understand the reading-writing connection;
that is, you must think of all texts they read as the writing of an author. You should not see a novel simply as a
book to read but as a finished and polished piece of writing. You should speculate, for example, on the reasons
William Faulkner chose to write “A Rose for Emily” with suspended detail and non-chronological ordering of events
or why Abraham Lincoln wrote “Four score and seven years ago” rather than simply “eight-seven years ago.” You
should examine their reading texts carefully to determine the intent of the writers. Our ongoing focus in the study
of rhetoric will be on how a writer uses language—diction, detail, image, tone, syntax, logical ordering, juxtaposition,
or contrast, for example—to achieve a specific purpose.

Rhetoric refers to the art of using words to persuade in writing or speaking. All types of writing—fiction,
nonfiction, drama, and poetry—seek to persuade, and rhetoricians study these genres for their persuasive qualities.
In our classroom you will study logic, the methods of ascertaining and preserving truth. You will learn how to
explore causal relationships, proving conclusions with sound logic and clear reasoning. You will learn to deliberate
issues carefully and to avoid hasty writing on a visceral level. You need to be able to analyze an assertion,
determine its validity, prepare an appropriate response, and communicate that spoken or written response with
clarity.

RHETORICAL THEORY

Argument: Argument is used here as a term to designate the entire persuasive essay. Writing argumentative
essays is a complex process that addresses a targeted audience with a specific purpose and requires reasoning, a
kind of controlled thinking in which the student comes to accept or reject an idea based on its validity and truth. An
error in reasoning, or a logical fallacy, will weaken an argument and diminish the credibility of the writer. Effective
arguments involve key issues, anticipated objections, gathered support, and logical reasoning to sway the thinking
or behavior of the audience. An effective argument is a well-contrived presentation of ideas that takes a stand about
an issue—often called the thesis statement or claim—and supports that thesis statement with various evidence or
premises.

In writing arguments, you will learn to consciously structure your writing, using logical lines of reasoning such as
order of importance, chain of reasoning, cause and effect, rebuttal, concession/refutation, and process analysis.
Writers of arguments will also use the various modes of discourse to support their claims with a combination of both
logical (logos) and emotional (pathos) evidence to establish their credibility as writers or their ethical appeal (ethos).
The argument’s inference is the relationship between the premises and a conclusion, the final statement, which
writers seek to prove as true and valid based on their premises, which also are assumed to be true.

Aristotle’s Rhetorical Triangle

logos (message)
context/occasion

kairos (the right moment,

opportune time)

pathos (audience) ethos (speaker)

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Purpose: Purpose is the specific reason or reasons for the writing. It conveys what the readers have to gain by
reading the essay. Purpose is the objective or the goal that the writer wishes to establish.
The writer’s purpose might be to…
 Support a cause
 Promote a change
 Refute a theory
 Stimulate interest
 Win agreement
 Arouse sympathy
 Provoke anger

Audience: The audience is the writer’s targeted reader or readers. The relationship between the writer and the
audience is critical. You should consider the kind of information, language, and overall approach that will appeal to
a specific audience. Here are some questions you can ask yourself during the prewriting stage of your
argumentative essays.
 Who exactly is the audience?
 What do they know?
 What do they believe?
 What do they expect?
 How will my audience disagree with me?
 What will they want me to address or answer?
 How can I—or should I—use jargon?
 Should I use language that is formal, factual, and objective, or familiar, anecdotal, and personal?

Rhetorical Strategies: Appeals of Logic, Emotion, and Ethics

Types of Logical Appeals (logos):

Incorporate inductive reasoning Order chronologically
Use of deductive reasoning Provide evidence
Create a syllogism Classify evidence
Cite traditional culture Use testimony
Cite commonly held beliefs Cite authorities
Allude to history, the Bible, great literature, or mythology Quote research
Manipulate the style Use facts
Employ various modes of discourse for specific effects Theorize about cause and effect
Provide testimony Argue from precedent
Draw analogies/create metaphors

Types of Emotional Appeals (pathos):

Develop non-logical appeals Explore the euphemism
Use language that involves the senses Use figurative language
Include a bias or prejudice Develop tone
Include connotative language Experiment with informal language

Ethical Appeal (ethos)

Show written voice in the argument Demonstrate that writer knows and respects the audience
Make audience believe writer is trustworthy Show concern about communicating with the audience
Demonstrate that writer put in research time Convince the audience that the writer is reliable and
Support reasons with appropriate, logical evidence knowledgeable
Present a carefully crafted and edited argument

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Logical Fallacies
Logical fallacies are errors in reasoning that render an argument invalid.

General guidelines for student writers:

1. Do not claim too much! No writing will completely solve or even fully address all problems
involved in a complex topic.
2. Do not oversimplify complex issues. You selected your topic because it is controversial and
multifaceted. If you reduce the argument to simplistic terms and come up with an easy
solution, you will lose your credibility and diminish your ethos.
3. Support your argument with concrete evidence and specific proposals, not with abstract
generalizations and familiar sentiments. Always assume that your audience is skeptical,
expecting you to demonstrate your case reasonably, without bias or shallow development.

Ten Common Logical Fallacies (there are many more!)

1. ad hominem fallacy--“To the individual,” a person’s character is attacked, instead of the argument.
Example: Nick Jacobson is not a worthy candidate for vice-president of the senior class because he is short and
frowns too much.

2. ad populum fallacy—“To the crowd,” a misconception that a widespread occurrence of something is assumed to
make an idea true or right. Example: The parents of Brittany’s friends allow their daughters to stay out until
2:00 a.m. on a school night, so Brittany’s parents should allow her to stay out until 2:00 as well.

3. begging the question—Taking for granted something that really needs proving. Example: “Free all political
prisoners” begs the question of whether some of those concerned have committed an actual crime like blowing up
the chemistry building in a political protest.” *

4. circular reasoning—Trying to prove one idea with another idea that is too similar to the first idea; such logical
ways move backwards in its attempt to move forward. Example: The nuns are not influential because they
rarely try to influence (Rep. Bart Stupak to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews).

5. either/or reasoning—The tendency to see an issue as having only two sides Example: The possession
of firearms should be completely banned or completely legal.

6. hasty generalization—Drawing a general and premature conclusion on the basis of only one or two cases.
Example: The Dallas Police Chief suggested that all dogs be muzzled because two golden retrievers have been
disturbing the peace in Fritz Park.

7. non sequitur—“It does not follow,” an inference or conclusion that does not follow from established premises or
evidence. Example: “He is certainly sincere; he must be right.” OR “He’s the most popular: He should be
president.”

8. pedantry—A display of narrow-minded and trivial scholarship; an arbitrary adherence to rules and forms.
Example: Mary prides herself in knowing so much about grammar, but she never earns high grades on essays
because she cannot think of insightful ideas or organize her essays. .

9. post hoc, ergo propter hoc--“After this, therefore because of this,” assuming that an incident that precedes
another is the cause of the second incident. Example: Han-Hui worked on his written argument longer than he
had for any other essay; therefore, he felt he must earn an “A.”

10. propaganda—Writing or images that seek to persuade through emotional appeal rather than through
logical proof; written or visual texts that describe or depict using highly connotative words or images—favorable
or unfavorable—without justification. Example: Chris’s infatuation with the model’s ruby red lips, beautiful
teeth, sparkling eyes, and streaming hair made him believe that Crest White is the best toothpaste.

11. false analogy—A fallacy in which an argument is based on misleading, superficial, or implausible comparisons.
“If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is gonna be as worthless as a

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Confederate dollar after the War Between The States—the Great War of Yankee Aggression.” (Paul Broun (R-
GA))

*Baker, Sheridan. The Practical Stylist With Readings. 8th Edition. New York: Longman, 1998.

Modes of Discourse**
Description -- The traditional classification of discourse that depicts images verbally in
space and time and arranges those images in a logical pattern, such as spatial or by association.

Narration-- The classification of discourse that tells a story or relates an event. It organizes the events or actions
in time or relates them in space. Relying heavily on verbs, prepositions, and adverbs, narration generally tells what
happened, when it happened, and where it happened.

Exposition-- One of the traditional classifications of discourse that has as a function to inform or to instruct or to
present ideas and general truths objectively. Exposition can use all of the following organizational patterns.
 Comparison: This traditional rhetorical strategy is based on the assumption that a subject may be shown
more clearly by pointing out ways it is similar to something else. The two subjects may each be explained
separately and then their similarities pointed out.
 Contrast: This traditional rhetorical strategy is based on the assumption that a subject may be shown
more clearly by pointing out ways in which it is unlike another subject.
 Cause and effect: One of the traditional rhetorical strategies, cause and effect consists in arguing from the
presence or absence of the cause to the existence or nonexistence of the effect or result; or, conversely, in
arguing from an effect to its probable causes.
 Classification: One of the traditional ways of thinking about a subject; classification identifies the subject
as a part of a larger group with shared features.
 Division: Division is a traditional way of thinking about a subject that includes breaking the subject into
smaller segments.
 Definition: Definition is a traditional pattern of thought which places a subject into an appropriate group
and then differentiates the subject from the other sections of the group. The first step limits the meaning of
the subject; the second step specifies its meaning. In prose, definitions are often extended by illustrations
and examples.
 Argumentation: Also persuasion. This traditional form of discourse functions by convincing or persuading
an audience or by proving or refuting a point of view or an issue. Argumentation uses induction, moving
from observations about particular things to generalization, or deduction, moving from generalizations to
valid references about particulars, or some combination of the two as its pattern of development.

**Woodson, Linda. A Handbook of Modern Rhetorical Terms. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
1979.

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Toulmin Structure of Argument
Claim
A claim is a statement that you are asking the other person to accept. This includes information you are asking
them to accept as true or actions you want them to accept and enact.

Many people start with a claim, but then find that it is challenged. If you just ask me to do something, I
will not simply agree with what you want. I will ask why I should agree with you. I will ask you to prove
your claim. This is where grounds become important.

Grounds
The grounds (or data) is the basis of real persuasion and is made up of data and hard facts, plus the reasoning
behind the claim. It is the 'truth' on which the claim is based. Grounds may also include proof of expertise and the
basic premises on which the rest of the argument is built. The actual truth of the data may be less than 100%, as all
data is based on perception and hence has some element of assumption about it.

It is critical to the argument that the grounds are not challenged, because if they are, they may become a claim,
which you will need to prove with even deeper information and further argument.

Data is usually a very powerful element of persuasion, although it does affect people differently. Those
who are dogmatic, logical or rational will more likely to be persuaded by data. Those who argue
emotionally and who are highly invested in their own position will challenge it or otherwise try to
ignore it. It is often a useful test to give something factual to the other person that disproves their
argument, and watch how they handle it. Some will accept it without question. Some will dismiss it out
of hand. Others will dig deeper, requiring more explanation. This is where the warrant comes into its
own.

Warrant
A warrant links data and other grounds to a claim, legitimizing the claim by showing the grounds to be relevant.
The warrant may be explicit or unspoken and implicit. It answers the question 'Why does that data mean your claim
is true?'

The warrant may be simple and it may also be a longer argument with additional sub-elements, including those
described below. Warrants may be based on logos, ethos or pathos, or values that are assumed to be shared with the
listener.

In many arguments, warrants are often implicit and hence unstated. This gives space for the other person to
question and expose the warrant, perhaps to show it is weak or unfounded.

There are 6 main argumentative strategies via which the relationship between evidence and claim are often
established. They have the acronym “GASCAP.”
 Generalization
 Analogy
 Sign
 Causality
 Authority
 Principle

These strategies are used at various different levels of generality within an argument, and rarely come in neat
packages - typically they are interconnected and work in combination.

Backing
The backing (or support) to an argument gives additional support to the warrant by answering different questions.
Sometimes the warrant is not broadly understood or broadly accepted. In that case, a speaker or writer may have to
defend the warrant by backing it up with reasons.

Qualifier
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The qualifier (or modal qualifier) indicates the strength of the leap from the data to the warrant and may limit how
universally the claim applies. They include words such as 'most', 'usually', 'always', 'sometimes'. Arguments may
thus range from strong assertions to generally quite floppy or largely and often rather uncertain kinds of statement.

Qualifiers and reservations are much used by advertisers who are constrained not to lie. Thus they slip 'usually',
'virtually', 'unless' and so on into their claims.

Rebuttal
Despite the careful construction of the argument, there may still be counter-arguments that can be used. These may
be rebutted either through a continued dialogue, or by pre-empting the counter-argument by giving the rebuttal
during the initial presentation of the argument.

Any rebuttal is an argument in itself, and thus may include a claim, warrant, backing and so on. It also, of course
can have a rebuttal. Thus if you are presenting an argument, you can seek both possible rebuttals and also rebuttals
to the rebuttals.

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Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard§

Critical reading—active engagement and interaction with texts—is essential to your academic success at
Harvard, and to your intellectual growth. Research has shown that students who read deliberately retain more
information and retain it longer. Your college reading assignments will probably be more substantial and more
sophisticated than those you are used to from high school. The amount of reading will almost certainly be greater.
College students rarely have the luxury of successive re-readings of material, either, given the pace of life in and out
of the classroom.
While the strategies below are (for the sake of clarity) listed sequentially, you can probably do most of them
simultaneously. They may feel awkward at first, and you may have to deploy them very consciously, especially if you
are not used to doing anything more than moving your eyes across the page. But they will quickly become habits,
and you will notice the difference—in what you “see” in a reading, and in the confidence with which you approach
your texts.

1. Previewing: Look “around” the text before you start reading.

You’ve probably engaged in one version of previewing in the past, when you’ve tried to determine how long an
assigned reading is (and how much time and energy, as a result, it will demand from you). But you can learn a great
deal more about the organization and purpose of a text but taking note of features other than its length. Previewing
enables you to develop a set of expectations about the scope and aim of the text. These very preliminary impressions
offer you a way to focus your reading. For instance:

 What does the presence of headnotes, an abstract, or other prefatory material tell you?
 Is the author known to you, and if so, how does his (or her) reputation or credentials influence your
perception of what you are about to read? If unknown, has an editor helped to situate the writer (by
supplying brief biographical information, an assessment of the author’s work, concerns, and importance)?
 How does the disposition or layout of a text prepare you for reading? Is the material broken into parts--
subtopics, sections, or the like? Are there long and unbroken blocks of text or smaller paragraphs or
“chunks” and what does this suggest? How might the layout guide your reading?
 Does the text seem to be arranged according to certain conventions of discourse? Newspaper articles, for
instance, have characteristics that you will recognize; textbooks and scholarly essays are organized quite
differently from them, and from one another. Texts demand different things of you as you read, so whenever
you can, register the type of information you’re presented with.

2. Annotating: “Dialogue” with yourself, the author, and the issues and ideas at stake.

From start to finish, make your reading of any text thinking-intensive.

 First of all: throw away the highlighter in favor of a pen or pencil. Highlighting can actually distract from
the business of learning and dilute your comprehension. It only seems like an active reading strategy; in
actual fact, it can lull you into a dangerous passivity.
 Mark up the margins of your text with WORDS: ideas that occur to you, notes about things that seem
important to you, reminders of how issues in a text may connect with class discussion or course themes. This
kind of interaction keeps you conscious of the REASON you are reading and the PURPOSES your instructor
has in mind. Later in the term, when you are reviewing for a test or project, your marginalia will be useful
memory triggers.
 Develop your own symbol system: asterisk a key idea, for example, or use an exclamation point for the
surprising, absurd, bizarre . . .. Like your marginalia, your hieroglyphs can help you reconstruct the
important observations that you made at an earlier time. And they will be indispensable when you return to
a text later in the term, in search of a passage, an idea for a topic, or while preparing for an exam or project.
 Get in the habit of hearing yourself ask questions—“what does this mean?” “why is he or she drawing that
conclusion?” “why is the class reading this text?” etc. Write the questions down (in your margins, at the
beginning or end of the reading, in a notebook, or elsewhere. They are reminders of the unfinished business
you still have with a text: something to ask during class discussion, or to come to terms with on your own,
once you’ve had a chance to digest the material further, or have done further reading.

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3. Outline, summarize, analyze: take the information apart, look at its parts, and then try to put it back
together again in language that is meaningful to you.

The best way to determine that you’ve really gotten the point is to be able to state it in your own words. Outlining
the argument of a text is a version of annotating, and can be done quite informally in the margins of the text, unless
you prefer the more formal Roman numeral model you may have learned in high school. Outlining enables you to
see the skeleton of an argument: the thesis, the first point and evidence (and so on), through the conclusion. With
weighty or difficult readings, that skeleton may not be obvious until you go looking for it. Summarizing accomplishes
something similar, but in sentence and paragraph form, and with the connections between ideas made explicit.
Analyzing adds an evaluative component to the summarizing process—it requires you not just to restate main ideas,
but also to test the logic, credibility, and emotional impact of an argument. In analyzing a text, you reflect upon and
weigh in on how effectively or how sloppily its argument has been made. Questions to ask:

 What is the writer asserting is true or valid (that is, what is he or she trying to convince me of? What am I
being asked to believe or accept?
 Why should I accept the writer’s claim(s) as true or valid? Or, conversely, why should I reject the writer’s
claim(s)?
 What reasons or evidence does the author supply me, and how effective is the evidence?
 What is fact? And what is opinion?
 Is there anywhere that the reasoning breaks down? Are there things that do not make sense?

4. Look for repetitions and patterns:

These are often indications of what an author considers crucial and what he expects you to glean from his argument.
The way language is chosen or used can also alert you to ideological positions, hidden agendas or biases. Be
watching for:

 Recurring images
 Repeated words, phrases, types of examples, or illustrations
 Consistent ways of characterizing people, events, or issues

5. Contextualize: After you’ve finished reading, put the reading in perspective.

 When was it written or where was it published? Do these factors change or otherwise affect how you view a
piece?
 Also view it through the lens of your own experience. Your understanding of the words on the page and their
significance is always shaped by what you have come to know and value from living in a particular time and
place.

6. Compare and Contrast: Fit this text into an ongoing dialogue

 At what point in the term does this reading come? Why that point, do you imagine?
 How does it contribute to the main concepts and themes of the course?
 How does it compare (or contrast) to the ideas presented by texts that come before it? Does it continue a
trend, shift direction, or expand the focus of previous readings?
 How has your thinking been altered by this reading or how has it affected your response to the issues and
themes of the course?

§Source: Harvard College Library, http://hcl.harvard.edu/research/guides/lamont_handouts/interrogatingtexts.html#top

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Strategies for Effective Analytical Reading in AP English

Use these questions to get you started in your analysis of readings for class. As the semester goes on and
you are used to more in-depth thinking, you will add questions. Think of this as a working document.

1. What is the text about? To answer this question, you need to:
 Take notes
 For each paragraph, list a word or phrase that identifies the point of the paragraph
 Collect your notes and phrases to create a summary of the piece

2. How is the text structured? To answer this question, you need to:
 Identify which of the statements function as claims, premises or reasons, evidence, and
conclusions
 Be able to describe the structure or composition of the essay
 Read for relationships between sentences and paragraphs

3. How would you describe the language of the text? To answer this question, you need to:
 Examine the syntax, diction, tone, and figures of speech used by the author
 Be able to describe the effect of each of these elements

4. To whom is the text addressed? How do you know this? To answer this question, you need to:
 Use historical or contextual evidence to speculate about the intended audience
 Identify the speaker’s tone

5. What effect does the text have on the reader? To answer this question, you need to:
 Identify rhetorical strategies used by the author
 Examine your emotional and intellectual responses to the text
 Figure out how the rhetorical strategies create the intellectual and emotional effects

6. What is the text arguing? To answer this question, you need to:
 Put the main points of all the paragraphs together to see what argument emerges
 Read for implied meaning
 Read for the relationships between sentences and paragraphs
 Look at the structure, language, and subject to see how these elements work together to
produce an argument

7. Is the text effective at its goal? Why? To answer this question, you need to:
 Identify the point or argument of the text
 Consider the rhetorical strategies at work in the text
 Determine whether the strategies work to supplement the point or argument

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GAG* Sheet (*Grammar at a Glance)

Subject Noun Independent Clause (I)
Dependent (D) / subordinate clause: Coordinating ADJ N. or PRO.
Predicate Pronoun Conjunctions
DO Verb *Adjective clause For But
IO Adjective *Adverb clause And Or ADV V, ADJ. or ADV.
PN Adverb *Noun clause Nor Yet
PA Conjunction Prepositions So Appositive =placed beside
OP Preposition another N to identify or
OC Interjection The mouse ran ___ the clock. explain it
Appositive phrase=
Transitional expressions: as a result, for appositive + modifiers
Book It is=it’s
Magazine Possessive it=its
example, in other words, at any rate, in addition, on
Newspaper, Someone left his or her
Film Singular subject + singular verbby the way, in fact, on the other hand
the contrary, umbrella.
“Short Story” John is going to the office. Capitalize
“Song” Specific names of persons, places,
things. One of the boys left his
“Article” Plural subject + plural verb umbrella.
“Essay” John and Mary are going to the office. Stone Mountain / mountain
Atlantic Ocean / ocean
President Bush / man S-V
Adjective Phrase Adverb Phrase Simple - I S-V-DO

Interjections- Wow, huh? Shoot,

A prepositional phrase A prepositional phrase Compound = I ; I S-V-IO-DO
functioning as an adjective. Complex = I+ D S-V-DO-OC
functioning as an adverb. Compound-Complex=I + D + I S-LV-PN
The boys from GHS tried S-LV PA
to outrun the opposition.
The water splashed along Posses- Who/Whom

blah! Duh!
Misplaced/Dangling Modifiers
the stream. sives Nominative=Who/whoever
-Filling the air with thick smoke, we watched the garage Objective = Whom/whomever
My
burn. (did we fill the air with smoke?)
-Joan bought a new DVD player for the family which never worked well.
Mine
(did the family or the DVD not work well?) Your Linking Verbs Comma
Yours Am D,I.
-The car went off the road while trying to read the map. His Items in a series
Is
(was the car trying to read the map?) Her Are City, State
Their
: (Colon) Was After nouns of address
Gerunds are –ing NOUNS and can do anything a noun Were I, conjunction I.
can do. Indicates a list I, transition I.
Spelling is an easy subject. SUBJECT
is to follow.
She is proficient in spelling. OP Participles are –ed or –ing ADJECTIVES.
I like swimming. DO -ing indicates a present participle
His hobby is singing . PN -ed (or the past-tense form of the verb indicates a past participle
Mary expects to learn typing. Object of infinitive
A gerund phrase is the gerund and the words that go with The dog eating the bone is mine. Modifies dog.
Lying in the sun, I got very sleepy. Modifies I
it. Running a 5K is especially satisfying.
The tall man carrying the briefcase is Mr. Bixby. Modifies man.
.
; (Semicolon) Adverb Phrases
Prepositional Phrases begin Adjective Phrase is a
is a prepositional phrase with a preposition and end prepositional phrase that
with a N or PRO. functions as an adjective.
-Between two or more
that functions as an adverb.
Correlative conjunctions
independent clauses. I;I.
The man with the big hat is
Both…and
-Between items inSubordinating
a series conjunctions Singular subject + singular verb
Plural
wealthy.subject + plural
modifies man Verb
when there are already Heas,ran without Either…or
Conjunctive adverbs - Also, anyway, besides, consequently,
After, although, as, as if, as much as though, as well as,
12
commas furthermore, however, still, instead, likewise, meanwhile,
Neither…nor
because, in the items.
before, stopping
even though, how, for 5K.
if, in order that, provided,
moreover, nevertheless, then, therefore
since, so that, than, that, when , whenever, where, wherever,
 13

DIDLS
Title: __________________________________________ NAME(S) ____________________________________
Page #s: _________________, starting at _____________________________ and ending ___________________

D
The author’s choice of words
and their connotations—What
words appear to have been chosen
specifically for their effects?
What effect do these words have
on your mood as the reader?
What do they seem to indicate
about the author’s tone?

I
The use of descriptions that
appeal to sensory experience—
What images are especially vivid?
To what sense do these appeal?
What effect do these images have
on your mood as a reader?
What do they seem to indicate
about the author’s tone?

D
Facts included or those
omitted—What details has the
author specifically included?
What details has the author
apparently left out?
What effect do these included and
excluded details have on your
mood as a reader?
What do these included and
excluded details seem to indicate
about the author’s tone?

L
Characteristics of the body of
words use (slang, jargon,
scholarly language, etc.)—How
could the language be described?
How does the language affect your
mood as a reader?
What does the language seem to
indicate about the author’s tone?

S
The way the sentences are
constructed—Are the sentences
simple, compound, declarative,
varied, etc.?
How do these structures affect
your mood as a reader?
What do these structures seem to
indicate about the author’s tone?
Is the emphasis on nouns or verbs?
What effect does this have?

13
 14

SOAPSTone
Text Title:___________________________________ Beginning at __________ and ending at ___________

Speaker –Who is the voice that is

speaking and what rhetorical devices does
he use – style?

• The voice that is speaking.

Identification of the historical person (or
group of people) who created the primary
source. What attributes identify the
speaker? Speaker’s perspective and
relationship to the text affect how text is
perceived
• What do we know about this historic or
contemporary person?
• What role does he play in an historic
event?

Occasion– What event or catalyst

initiated writing?

• What is the time and place, the context

in which the primary source was created?
• What is the geographic and historic
intersection at which this source was
produced?
Audience—To whom is the piece
directed?

• Is the writing intended to challenge a

predicted point of view? To build on a
predicted shared point of view?
• Is the audience a peer group?
Superiors? Other?
• Are there both intended and unintended
audiences?
Purpose – What is the reason
behind text?

• Why was it written? What goal did the

author have in mind?
• What is the reader supposed to think or
do as a result of reading/hearing this?
Subject – What is the general topic or
main idea?

• State the subject in a few words or

phrases
Tone – What is the attitude of author
toward the subject?

• Examine the choice of words, emotions

expressed, imagery, etc., (DIDLS) used to
determine the speaker’s attitude.

14
 15

organized; strong evidence; Rhetorical Analysis Rubric

9 Essays earning a score of 9 meet the criteria for a score of 8 and, in addition, are especially sophisticated in their
High…concise, articulate;
commentary specific; well

argument, thorough in their development, or impressive in their control of language.

8 Effective Essays earning a score of 8 effectively analyze* how Capote uses rhetorical strategies to convey his message.
They develop their analysis with evidence and explanations that are appropriate and convincing, referring to the
precise language

passage explicitly or implicitly. The prose demonstrates a consistent ability to control a wide range of the elements of
effective writing but is not necessarily flawless.
insufficient analysis; doesn’t rise above

7 Essays earning a score of 7 meet the criteria for a score of 6 but provide more complete explanation, more thorough
ordinary; some summary; lacks deep
perceptions; simple analysis at times

development, or a more mature prose style.

Medium…accurate points; some

6 Adequate Essays earning a score of 6 adequately analyze how Capote uses rhetorical strategies to convey his message
to his audience. They develop their analysis with evidence and explanations that are appropriate and sufficient,
referring to the passage explicitly or implicitly. The writing may contain lapses in diction or syntax, but generally the
prose is clear.
5 Essays earning a score of 5 analyze how Capote uses rhetorical strategies to convey his message to his audience. The
evidence or explanations used may be uneven, inconsistent, or limited. The writing may contain lapses in diction or
syntax, but it usually conveys the student’s ideas.
Low…attempts to discuss topic; some relevant

4 Inadequate Essays earning a score of 4 inadequately analyze how Capote uses rhetorical strategies to convey his
message to his audience. These essays may misunderstand the passage, misrepresent the strategies Capote uses, or
may analyze these strategies inaccurately. The evidence or explanations used may be inappropriate, insufficient, or less
convincing. The prose generally conveys the student’s ideas but may be less consistent in controlling the elements of
points; unfocused or vague at times.

effective writing.
3 Essays earning a score of 3 meet the criteria for a score of 4 but demonstrate less success in analyzing Capote’s use of
rhetorical strategies to convey his message to his audience. They are less perceptive in their understanding of the
passage or Capote’s strategies, or the explanation or examples may be particularly limited or simplistic. The essays may
show less maturity in control of writing.
2 Little Success Essays earning a score of 2 demonstrate little success in analyzing how Capote uses rhetorical strategies
to convey his message to his audience. These essays may misunderstand the prompt, misread the passage, fail to
analyze the strategies Capote uses, or substitute a simpler task by responding to the prompt tangentially with unrelated,
inaccurate, or inappropriate explanation. The prose often demonstrates consistent weaknesses in writing, such as
grammatical problems, a lack of development or organization, or a lack of control.
1 Essays earning a score of 1 meet the criteria for a score of 2 but are undeveloped, especially simplistic in their
explanation, or weak in their control of language.

0 Indicates an on-topic response that receives no credit, such as one that merely repeats the prompt.
— Indicates a blank response or one that is completely off topic.

15
 16

American novelist and playwright Irwin Shaw (1913-1984) was also a

distinguished short-story writer. One of his most enduring tales is "The Eighty-Yard
Run," about a frustrated ex-jock whose single moment of triumph took place 15 years
earlier during football practice.
In this, the opening paragraph of the story, Shaw relies on participial phrases
and absolute phrases to bring to life Christian Darling's memory of his few seconds of
fleeting glory.

from The Eighty-Yard Run by Irwin Shaw

The pass was high and wide and he jumped for it, feeling it slap flatly against his hands, as he shook his
hips to throw off the halfback who was diving at him. The center floated by, his hands desperately brushing
Darling’s knee as Darling picked his feet up high and delicately ran over a blocker and an opposing linesman in
a jumble on the ground near the scrimmage line. He had ten yards in the clear and picked up speed, breathing
easily, feeling his thigh pads rising and falling against his legs, listening to the sound of cleats behind him,
pulling away from them, watching the other backs heading him off toward the sidelines, the whole picture, men
closing in on him, the blockers fighting for position, the ground he had to cross, all suddenly clear in his head,
for the first time in his life not a meaningless confusion of men, sounds, speed. He smiled a little to himself as
he ran, holding the ball lightly in front of him with his two hands, his knees pumping high, his hips twisting in
the almost girlish run of a back in a broken field. The first halfback came at him as he fed him his leg, then
swung at the last moment, took the shock of the man’s shoulder without breaking stride, ran right through him,
his cleats biting securely to the turf. There was only the safety man now, coming warily at him, his arms
crooked, hands spread. Darling tucked the ball in, spurted at him, driving hard, hurling himself along, his legs
pounding knees high, all two hundred pounds bunched into controlled attack. He was sure he was going to get
past the safety man. Without thought, his arm and legs working beautifully together, he headed right for the
safety man, stiff-armed him, feeling the blood spurt instantaneously from the man’s nose into his hand, seeing
his face go awry, head turned, mouth pulled to one side. He pivoted away keeping the arm locked, dropping the
safety man as he ran easily toward the goal line, with the drumming of cleats diminishing behind him.

First published in Playboy magazine (May 1955), "The Eighty-Yard Run" appears in Irwin Shaw's Short
Stories: Five Decades, originally published by Delacorte Press in 1978 and reprinted in 2000 by the University
of Chicago Press.

16
 17

Journalist David Simon has served as a writer and producer on two of the
most highly acclaimed programs to appear on American television: Homicide: Life
on the Street (NBC, 1993 to 2000) and The Wire (HBO, 2002-2008). Both programs
were inspired by Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991), a book that
chronicles the work of the homicide unit of the Baltimore Police Department.
In the following passage from Homicide, Simon relies on a series of analogies
to convey, from the dual perspectives of detective and suspect, what goes on in a
police interrogation room.

Inside the Interrogation Room from Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets*, by
David Simon

Homicide detectives in Baltimore like to imagine a small, open window at the top of the long wall in the
large interrogation room. More to the point, they like to imagine their suspects imagining a small, open window
at the top of the long wall. The open window is the escape hatch, the Out. It is the perfect representation of what
every suspect believes when he opens his mouth during interrogation. Every last one envisions himself parrying
questions with the right combination of alibi and excuse; every last one sees himself coming up with the right
words, then crawling out the window to go home and sleep in his own bed. More often than not, a guilty man is
looking for the Out from his first moments in the interrogation room; in that sense, the window is as much the
suspect's fantasy as the detective's mirage.
The effect of the illusion is profound, distorting as it does the natural hostility between hunter and
hunted, transforming it until it resembles a relationship more symbiotic than adversarial. That is the lie, and
when the roles are perfectly performed, deceit surpasses itself, becoming manipulation on a grand scale and
ultimately an act of betrayal. Because what occurs in an interrogation room is indeed little more than a carefully
staged drama, a choreographed performance that allows a detective and his suspect to find common ground
where none exists. There, in a carefully controlled purgatory, the guilty proclaim their malefactions, though
rarely in any form that allows for contrition or resembles an unequivocal admission.
In truth, catharsis in the interrogation room occurs for only a few rare suspects, usually those in
domestic murders or child abuse cases wherein the leaden mass of genuine remorse can crush anyone who is not
hardened to his crime. But the greater share of men and women brought downtown take no interest in
absolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly noted that for those responsible, the act of murder "is no such ruinous
thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or frighten him from his ordinary notice of
trifles." And while West Baltimore is a universe or two from Emerson's nineteenth-century Massachusetts
hamlet, the observation is still useful. Murder often doesn't unsettle a man. In Baltimore, it usually doesn't even
ruin his day.

* David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1991 and
reprinted by Holt Paperbacks in 2006.

17
 18

In the opening chapter of his entertaining travel book Neither Here Nor There (1992),
journalist Bill Bryson recalls his first visit to Europe as a college student 20 years earlier.
In the following paragraph from that chapter, Bryson uses lists and anaphora to convey how
"smitten" he was by his first impression of Luxembourg City.

from Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe* by Bill Bryson

I had brought with me a yellow backpack so enormous than when I went through customs I half
expected to be asked, "Anything to declare? Cigarettes? Alcohol? Dead horse?" and spent the day teetering
beneath it through the ancient streets of Luxembourg city in a kind of vivid haze--an unfamiliar mixture of
excitement and exhaustion and intense optical stimulation. Everything seemed so vivid and acutely focused and
new. I felt like someone stepping out of doors for the first time. It was all so different: the language, the money,
the cars, the license plates on the cars, the bread, the food, the newspapers, the parks, the people. I had never
seen a zebra crossing before, never seen a tram, never seen an unsliced loaf of bread (never even considered it
an option), never seen anyone wearing a beret who expected to be taken seriously, never seen people go to a
different shop for each item of dinner or provide their own shopping bags, never seen feathered pheasants and
unskinned rabbits hanging in a butcher's window or a pig's head smiling on a platter, never seen a packet of
Gitanes or the Michelin man. And the people--why, they were Luxembourgers. I don't know why this amazed
me so, but it did. I kept thinking: "That man over there, he's a Luxembourger. And so is that girl. They don't
know anything about the New York Yankees, they don't know the theme tune to the Mickey Mouse Club, they
are from another world." It was just wonderful.
* From Chapter One, "To the North," of Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe, by Bill Bryson, published
by William Morrow and Company in 1992, reprinted in paperback by Harper Perennial in 1999.

18
 19

In these three paragraphs from the short story "Midair," Frank Conroy relies on a variety
of sentence structures to convey Jack's memory of winning a Ford convertible in a church
raffle. Note, in particular, Conroy's effective use of appositives and absolute phrases to add
key details.

from "Midair"* by Frank Conroy

He drifts away, remembering sophomore year and the old Mercury he'd bought
from Elvin Marsdale in French House. A big, top-heavy brute of a car, it had broken down
constantly, forcing him to spend as much time in junkyards looking for parts as on the road. When, finally, his
tuned ear told him the engine itself was dying--inexorable death from the inside, rings totally worn, valves
gasping, driveshaft groaning--he'd sold it to an ignorant graduate student at a slight profit.
For awhile he had no car, and then an extraordinary piece of luck occurred--he won a Ford convertible
in a lottery, a new model full equipped with accessories, white walls, and a St. Christopher's medal. He
suspected fraud, a telephone prank on the part of his classmates, but when he showed up at the rectory of an
enormous church in downtown New Haven the car was indeed there, parked in an inner courtyard, and when he
handed over the lottery ticket a fat priest gave him a set of keys, the registration, and a slap on the back. In the
courtyard he walked around the car several times. The chrome gleamed with almost unbearable intensity. He
could see a distorted image of himself in the waxed black body, his face slipping like oil over the curved
surfaces. He was afraid to touch the car. When he got in he was afraid to start the engine. He stared at his eyes
in the mirror (familiar blue--he was apparently there) for several moments before adjusting the glass. Then he
pushed the seat back a couple of notches, turned the ignition, and rolled slowly out of the courtyard and onto the
street.
The car became his in time, of course, but it was never entirely his. There was an aura of the
supernatural clinging to it until the end, until trade-in. In dreams the fat priest asked for it back. He treated the
car badly.

* "Midair" appears in Frank Conroy's story collection Midair, published by Dutton in 1970 and reprinted by
Penguin in 1986.

19
 20

American author Alexander Theroux has described writing as "an assault on cliché," and his
novels, essays, and poems are distinguished by stylistic inventiveness and wit. In the followin g
excerpts from a short essay on the camel, he both informs and delights--often relying on
appositives to clarify and amplify his observations.

from "How Curious the Camel"* by Alexander Theroux

It is a beast of great mystery, an ancient enigma--the camel, according to legend, alone knows the 100th
name of Allah. It is the ultimate paradox of whole parts: a mode of transportation, of exchange, of sustenance,
indeed, of survival itself. . . .
Arabian camels have one hump. This is the famed dromedary, the runner. Many nomads might be
astonished to see the two-humped Bactrian variety of central Asia, a slow, plodding beast of burden. The
distinction, like that between stalactites and stalagmites, has confused schoolboys for generations.
A camel has been described as a horse planned by a committee. It has a comic munch of a face--loony,
serene and disgusted all at once--with liquid eyes that shine bottle-green at night. Its eyelashes are as long as
Ann Sheridan's. Its large nostrils can close against blowing sand. A ruminant, it chews its cud--the half-chewed
slop that the animal sucks back up to its mouth with a slobbering sound as it plods along. . . .
The camel is called the Ship of the Desert--its habitat. It survives on guddha--leaves, dried plants, grass
and withered tribulus. It relies on its humpfat, as well, which is stiff and upright when in top condition but
decreases in size when the camel is overworked.
It is indeed an intricate equation, the camel a beast of binaries: wild but domesticated; savage yet
submissive; vile and vulnerable; patient as well as perverse. . . . This can proudly be said: it bears its load.

* Alexander Theroux's "How Curious the Camel" first appeared in Reader's Digest, February 1983.

20
 21

In this "sidebar" from his memoir Moab Is My Washpot (1997), British actor,
author, and humorist Stephen Fry explains why he harbors no anger toward the teachers
who beat him--frequently, with great swats of a cane--during his years at Stouts Hill
School. Although he does not argue in favor of corporal punishment, Fry insists that "the
men who beat me were not swine" and the punishments "at least had the virtue of being
over quickly."

On Corporal Punishment from Moab Is My Washpot, by Stephen Fry

We are living in a statistically rare and improbable period of British life. The last twenty years are the
only twenty years of our history in which children have not been beaten for misbehaviour. Every Briton you can
think of, from Chaucer to Churchill, from Shakespeare to Shilton, was beaten as a child. If you are under thirty,
then you are the exception. Maybe we are on the threshold of a brave new world of balanced and beautiful
Britons. I hope so.
You won’t find me offering the opinion that beating is a good thing or recommending the return of the
birch. I frankly regard corporal punishment as of no greater significance in the life of most human beings than
bustles, hula-hoops, flared trousers, side-whiskers or any other fad. Until, that is, one says that it isn’t. Which is
to say, the moment mankind decides that a practice like beating is of significance then it becomes of
significance. I should imagine that were I a child now and found myself being beaten by schoolmasters I would
be highly traumatised by the experience, for every cultural signal would tell me that beating is, to use the
American description, a "cruel and unusual punishment" and I would feel singled out for injustice and smart and
wail accordingly.
Let’s try--and God knows it’s hard--to be logical about this. If we object to corporal punishment, and I
assume we do, on what grounds is this objection based? On the grounds that it is wrong to cause a child pain?
Well, I don’t know about you, but when I recall childhood pain, I don’t recall the pains of toothache, a thrashed
backside, broken bones, stubbed toes, gashed knees or twisted ankles--I recall the pains of loneliness, boredom,
abandonment, humiliation, rejection and fear. Those are the pains on which I might and, still sometimes do,
dwell, and those pains, almost without exception, were inflicted on me by other children and by myself.
I have paused on this subject of corporal punishment because the issue is so culturally loaded today as to
be almost impossible to inspect. It comes in so many people’s minds very close to the idea of "abuse," a word
which when used within ten spaces of the word "child" causes hysteria, madness and stupidity in almost
everybody.
I know that had I dispassionately described to you the use of the cane without any comment, without
summoning counsel for a conference in chambers, then many of you would have wondered what I was up to
and whether I was entirely balanced. You will have to form your own judgements, but try to understand that
when I think about being caned for repeatedly talking after lights out, or for Mobbing About In The Malt
Queue, and other such mad prep-schooly infractions, I feel far less passion and distress than I do when I think
about the times I was put into detention for crimes of which I was innocent. If it should so happen that you
could prove to me that one of the masters who beat me may have derived sexual gratification from the practice,
I would shrug my shoulders and say, "Poor old soul, at least he never harmed me." Abuse is exploitation of trust
and exploitation of authority and I was lucky enough never to suffer from that or from any violation or cruelty,
real or imagined.
It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me.
Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have
knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.

* Source: Moab Is My Washpot, by Stephen Fry, published in the U.K. by Hutchinson (1997) and in the U.S. by
Soho Press (1997).
21
 22

American writer and humorist Ian Frazier is best known for his short essays in The New
Yorker magazine and for his 1989 historical work, Great Plains, in which the following
paragraph appears.
One critic has pointed to this lengthy series as evidence of Frazier's "immature e and
unsophisticated" literary style. Other readers see it as an example of the artful playfulness that
characterizes his best work.

from Great Plains* by Ian Frazier

Personally, I love Crazy Horse because even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was;
because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly
where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle;
because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he
didn't know what a jail looked like; because at the most desperate moment of his life he only cut Little Big Man
on the hand; because, unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by
the encounter; because his dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic; because the idea of becoming a
farmer apparently never crossed his mind; because he didn't end up in the Dry Tortugas; because he never met
the President; because he never rode on a train, slept in a boardinghouse, ate at a table; because he never wore a
medal or a top hat or any other thing that white men gave him; because he made sure that his wife was safe
before going to where he expected to die; because although Indian agents, among themselves, sometimes
referred to Red Cloud as "red" and Spotted Tail as "spot," they never used a diminutive for him; because,
deprived of freedom, power, occupation, culture, trapped in a situation where bravery was invisible, he was still
brave; because he fought in self-defense, and took no one with him when he died; because, like the rings of
Saturn, the carbon atom, and the underwater reef, he belonged to a category of phenomena which our
technology had not then advanced far enough to photograph; because no photograph or painting or even sketch
of him exists; because he is not the Indian on the nickel, the tobacco pouch, or the apple crate. Crazy Horse was
a slim man of medium height with brown hair hanging below his waist and a scar above his lip. Now, in the
mind of each person who imagines him, he looks different.

* Originally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1989, Great Plains was recently republished in paperback
by Granta Books (2006).

22
 23

In both his fiction and nonfiction, American author Nicholson Baker pays
extraordinary attention to the small details of everyday life--"things that you don't
notice when you're noticing them." His first novel, The Mezzanine (1988), concerns
the observations of a man riding an escalator after buying shoelaces on his lunch
hour. In this footnote from Chapter Nine, Baker (or rather the book's narrator,
Howie) celebrates the miraculous qualities of perforation in an unconventional
encomium.

Nicholson Baker's Encomium to Perforation – Passage from The Mezzanine*

Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will
tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired white pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a
staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped-wood fiber. Yet do
we have national holidays to celebrate its development? Are festschrift volumes published honoring the dead
greats in the field? People watch the news every night like robots thinking they are learning about their lives,
never paying attention to the far more immediate developments that arrive unreported, on the zip-lock
perforated top of the ice cream carton, in reply coupons bound in magazines and on the "Please Return This
Portion" edging of bill stubs, on sheets of postage stamps and sheets of Publishers Clearing House magazine
stamps, on paper towels, in rolls of plastic bags for for produce at the supermarket, in strips of hanging file-
folder labels. The lines dividing one year from another in your past are perforated, and the mental sensation of
detaching a period of your life for closer scrutiny resembles the reluctant guided tearing of a perforated seam.
The only educational aspect of the Ginn series of grade-school readers was the perforated tear-out pages in their
workbooks: after you tore out the page (folding it back and forth over the line first to ready it for its rending), a
little flap was left bound in the workbook that told the teacher in tiny sideways type what that page was meant
to teach the student: the page I remember from first grade was a picture of Jack standing with a red wagon at the
top left, and Spot waiting for him on the lower right, with a dotted line in a large Z shape connecting the two.
The instructions were "Make Jack take the wagon to Spot," or something like that--and you clearly were not
supposed to take the diagonal route, but rather were meant to travel this pointless Z with your crayon. The
sideways explanation in the grown-up side of the perforation claimed that the Z path taught the child the ideal
motion of the reading eyeballs--one line of type, a zag of a cartridge return, another line of type. I scorned the
exercise only a little, because the dotted line itself was like the dotted line printed over perforations in reply
coupons and intrinsically beautiful, despite the boy and dog at either end. I was taught, later, about the Indians
of New York State, about Harriet Tubman and George Washington Carver and Susan B. Anthony--why don't I
have any clear idea now, after years of schooling, how the perforation of the reply coupon or the roll of toilet
paper is accomplished? My guesses are pitiable! Circular pizza cutters, with diamond-tipped radii? Zirconium
templates, fatally sharp to the touch, stamping the paper with their barbed braillery? Why isn't the pioneer of
perforation chiseled into the façades of libraries, along with Locke, Franklin, and the standard bunch of French
Encyclopedists? They would have loved him! They would have devoted a whole page of beautifuilly engraved
illustration, with "fig. 1's" and "fig. 2's," to the art.

23
 24

Best known for his semi-autobiographical novels The Great Santini and The Lords of
Discipline, American author Pat Conroy has also published a memoir (My Losing
Season) and a number of personal essays. In "Confessions of an Ex-Catholic," he
examines his contradictory attitudes toward the Catholic Church: "I love the Church. I
hate the Church. I am through with the Church. But I am still as Catholic as the Pope."
Here he uses several specific examples to demonstrate the pleasure he takes in the
"baroque and euphonic language" of the faith in which he was raised.

from "Confessions of an Ex-Catholic" by Pat Conroy

From a God-struck child I have matured into a God-haunted adult. I wish to be rid of him yet fear that I
never will completely. Just as I always will be American and Southern, I will always be Catholic. I left the
Church but she has not left me.
This seems to be the universal condition of ex-Catholics. We said our goodbyes but did not totally
escape. For this reason, I am presenting my children with a gift. They will never see the inside of a Catholic
school or a Catholic Church. Their nightmares will be free of nuns, priests, fire, and crucified gods. I am raising
them as nothing at all. They are free to make their own peace with the universe.
Yet I do not regret my education. I think no writer could regret a childhood which included such a
baroque and euphonic language. I loved words like sodality, litany, and imprimatur. I loved the lists of names in
the Proper of the Saints with its twisting, Latinesque evocations: Andifax, Chrysogonous, Zaphyrinus, Ubaldus,
Polycarp, and Hermanigild. The priest I dressed for 6:15 mass wore an amice, a cincture, a chasuble, and a stole
while he performed the sacrifice of the mass during the asperges or on Rogation Days or Quinquagesima
Sunday. I loved the poetry of the Church prayers even though I once got in trouble for telling a nun that the
Douay-Rheims version of the Bible (the Catholic version) was not as well written as the King James Version.
I loved Georgian chants, the sight of nuns at prayer on Good Friday, the sanctus bells, the covered forms
of saints during Lent, the drum roll of the confiteor with all the sadness and elegance of a dead language filling
a church and entering my bloodstream at the ear, and the sunburst of gold when the priest raised the monstrous
chalice at consecration. I loved the ceremony, the adherence to tradition, and the arsenal of metaphor. I have
never recovered from the vividness of its imagery, from the daze of its language. But I have never had a single
day when I wished to be Catholic again.

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American poet and scientist Loren Eiseley (1907-1977) followed in a rich tradition of natural-history
writers, including Gilbert White, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and John
Muir. As Andrew Angyal writes in the Encyclopedia of the Essay, "What Eiseley accomplished through his
popular essays was to create an imaginative synthesis of literature and science--one that enlarged the power
and range of the personal essay."
In this excerpt from "The Dream Animal," an informal study of human evolution, Eiseley relies on
patterns of cause and effect to explore the mystery of the rapid emergence of the human brain.

from "The Dream Animal"* by Loren Eiseley

Somewhere in the glacial mists that shroud the past, Nature found a way of speeding the proliferation of
brain cells and did it by the ruthless elimination of everything not needed to that end. We lost our hairy
covering, our jaws and teeth were reduced in size, our sex life was postponed, our infancy became among the
most helpless of any of the animals because everything had to wait upon the development of that fast-growing
mushroom which had sprung up in our heads.
Now in man, above all creatures, brain is the really important specialization. As Gavin de Beer, Director
of the British Museum of Natural History, has suggested, it appears that if infancy is lengthened, there is a
correspondingly lengthier retention of embryonic tissues capable of undergoing change.† Here, apparently, is a
possible means of stepping up brain growth. The anthropoid ape, because of its shorter life cycle and slow brain
growth, does not make use of nearly the amount of primitive neuroblasts--the embryonic and migrating nerve
cells--possible in the lengthier, and at the same time paradoxically accelerated development of the human child.
The clock in the body, in other words, has placed a limit upon the pace at which the ape brain grows--a limit
which, as we have seen, the human ancestors in some manner escaped. This is a simplification of a complicated
problem, but it hints at the answer to Wallace's question of long ago as to why man shows such a strange, rich
mental life, many of whose artistic aspects can have had little direct value measured in the old utilitarian terms
of the selection of all qualities in the struggle for existence.
When these related potentialities for brain growth began, they carried man into a new world where the
old laws no longer totally held. With every advance in language, in symbolic thought, the brain paths
multiplied. Significantly enough, those which are most heavily involved in the life processes, and are most
ancient, mature first. The most recently acquired and less specialized regions of the brain, the "silent areas,"
mature last. Some neurologists, not without reason, suspect that here may lie other potentialities which only the
future of the race may reveal.

†Embryos and Ancestors, rev. ed. (New York, Oxford, 1951), p. 93.

*"The Dream Animal" by Loren Eiseley appeared in The Immense Journey, published in 1957 by Random
House and currently available in a paperback edition published by Vintage Books.

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An enormously popular writer of horror fiction for the past 35 years, Stephen
King has more re cently begun to attract significant critical attention as well. After
collecting numerous Bram Stoker Awards, Locus Awards, and World Fantasy Awards,
in 2003 he received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters Award.
In this excerpt from an article that first appeared in Playboy magazine in 1981,
King examines the causes and effects of an experience that points, he says, to the
"insanity" inside us all.

from "Why We Crave Horror Movies"* by Stephen King

When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror
movie, we are daring the nightmare.
Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not afraid, that we
can ride this roller coaster. Which is not to say that a really good horror movie may not surprise a scream out of
us at some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster twists through a complete 360 or plows
through a lake at the bottom of the drop. And horror movies, like roller coasters, have always been the special
province of the young; by the time one turns 40 or 50, one’s appetite for double twists or 360-degree loops may
be considerably depleted.
We also go to reestablish our feelings of essential normality; the horror movie is innately conservative,
even reactionary. Freda Jackson as the horrible melting woman in Die, Monster, Die! confirms for us that no
matter how far we may be removed from the beauty of a Robert Redford or a Diana Ross, we are still light-
years from true ugliness.
And we go to have fun.
Ah, but this is where the ground starts to slope away, isn’t it? Because this is a very peculiar sort of fun,
indeed. The fun comes from seeing others menaced--sometimes killed. One critic has suggested that if pro
football has become the voyeur’s version of combat, then the horror film has become the modern version of the
public lynching.

* "Why We Crave Horror Movies," by Stephen King, was first published in Playboy magazine, January 1981.

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A staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1965, John McPhee is one
of America's foremost writers of creative nonfiction. Known especially for his
profiles and travel writings, McPhee has published 27 books, and in 1999 he was
awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his geological study Annals of the Former World.
Originally published in The New Yorker, McPhee's essay "Giving Good
Weight" provides a detailed study of the vendors and customers at the Greenmarket
in New York City. In this excerpt, he combines vivid descriptions with direct
quotations in his sketch of a schoolteacher who works in the market during summer
vacations.

Sketch of Derryck Brooks-Smithfrom "Giving Good Weight," by John McPhee

"These tomatoes come from a remote corner of Afghanistan," Derryck Brooks-Smith is saying to some
hapless client. "They will send you into ecstasy." She is young and appears to believe him, but she may be in
ecstasy already. Brooks-Smith is a physical masterpiece. He wears running shorts. Under a blue T-shirt, his
breasts bulge. His calves and thighs are ribbed with muscle. His biceps are smooth brown loaves. His hair is
short and for the most part black, here and there brindled with gray. His face is fine-featured, smile disarming.
He continues about the tomatoes: "The smaller ones are from Hunza, a little country in the Himalayas. The
people of Hunza attribute their longevity to these tomatoes. Yes, three pounds for a dollar. They also attribute
their longevity to yogurt and a friendly family. I like your dress. It fits you well."
Brooks-Smith teaches at John Marshall Intermediate School, in Brooklyn. "A nice white name in a black
neighborhood," he once remarked. He was referring to the name of the school, but he could as well have meant
his own. He was born in the British West Indies. His family moved to New York in 1950, when he was ten. He
has a master's degree from City University. "It is exciting for me to be up here in Harlem, among my own
people," he has told me over the scale. "Many of them are from the South. They talk about Georgia, about South
Carolina. They have a feeling for the farm a lot of people in the city don't have." He quotes Rimbaud to his
customers. He fills up the sky for them with the "permanganate sunsets" of Henry Miller. He instructs them in
nutrition. He lectures on architecture in a manner that makes them conclude correctly that he is talking about
them. They bring him things. Books, mainly. Cards of salutation and farewell, anticipating his return to school.
"Peace, brother, may you always get back the true kindness you give." The message is handwritten. The card
and its envelope are four feet wide. A woman in her eighties who is a Jehovah's Witness hands him a book, her
purpose to immortalize his soul. She will miss him. He has always given her a little more than good weight. "I
love old people," he says when she departs. "We have a lot to learn from them."

John McPhee's "Giving Good Weight" originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine (July, 3, 1978) and
serves as the title essay of his collection Giving Good Weight, published by Farrar, Straus Giroux in 1979,
reprinted in paperback in 1994.

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A failed writer, husband, and father, Frank Bascombe is a middle-aged real estate
agent who has moved into his ex-wife's house in an effort to reconnect with his son and
daughter. Bascombe is the narrator and protagonist of Richard Ford's fifth novel,
Independence Day (1995), winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Pen/Faulkner Award.
In this passage from Chapter Five of Ford's novel, Bascombe reflects on his own
behavior through a highly personal classification of a seemingly simple facial expression.

from Independence Day* by Richard Ford

Then, suddenly, peering up at the brassy fan listlessly turning, I for some reason wince--whing-crack!--
as though a rock or a scary shadow or a sharp projectile had flashed close and just missed maiming me, making
my whole head whip to the right, setting my heart to pounding thunk-a, thunk-a, thunk-a, thunk-a, exactly the
way it did that summer evening Ann announced she was marrying Frank O'Dell and moving to Deep River and
stealing my kids.
But why now?
There are winces, of course, and there are other winces. There is the "love wince," the shudder--often
with accompanying animal groan--of hot-rivet sex imagined, followed frequently by a sense of loss thick
enough to upholster a sofa. There is the "grief wince," the one you experience in bed at 5 a.m., when the phone
rings and some stranger tells you your mother or your first son has "regretfully" expired; this is normally
attended by a chest-emptying sorrow which is almost like relief but not quite. There is the "wince of fury,"
when your neighbor's Irish setter, Prince Sterling, has been barking at squirrels' shadows for months, night after
night, keeping you awake and in an agitation verging on dementia, though unexpectedly you confront the
neighbor at the end of the driveway at dusk, only to be told you're blowing the whole dog-barking thing way out
of proportion, that you're too tightly wrapped and need to smell the roses. This wince is often followed by a shot
to the chops and can also be called "the Billy Budd."
What I have just suffered, though, is none of these and has left me light-headed and tingling, as if an
electrical charge had been administered via terminals strapped to my neck. Black spots wander my vision, my
ears feel as though glass tumblers were pressed over them.

* Independence Day, by Richard Ford, was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1995. It is currently
available in a Vintage paperback (1996).

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At the end of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road, narrator Sal Paradise finds himself
back where his cross-country journey began a year earlier--in New York City. What
specific features of Kerouac's prose contribute to its colloquial flavor--the sense that
Sal is talking to us?

from On the Road* by Jack Kerouac

Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American
continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent
road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling
forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they
could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. The high towers of the land--the other
end of the land, the place where Paper America is born. I stood in a subway doorway, trying to get enough
nerve to pick up a beautiful long butt, and every time I stooped great crowds rushed by and obliterated it from
my sight, and finally it was crushed. I had no money to go home in a bus. Paterson is quite a few miles from
Times Square. Can you picture me walking those last miles though the Lincoln Tunnel or over the Washington
Bridge and into New Jersey? It was dusk. Where was Hassel? I dug the square for Hassel; he wasn’t there, he
was in Riker’s Island, behind bars. Where Dean? Where everybody? Where life? I had my home to go to, my
place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figure the gain that I knew was in there somewhere too. I
had to panhandle two bits for the bus. I finally hit a Greek minister who was standing around the corner. He
gave me a quarter with a nervous look away. I rushed immediately to the bus.

* Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) was republished by Penguin in 1999.

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British journalist Anthony Lane has been a film reviewer for The New Yorker magazine since 1993. "I'm
not a creative writer," he once told an interviewer. "I don't write poetry or novels or drama but criticism, which
is the eunuch of the family." In 2001 he received a National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism, and in
2002 he published Nobody's Perfect: Writings From The New Yorker (Knopf in the US; Picador in the UK).
In this passage from a review of the film The White Ribbon (2009), Lane compares two kinds of movies:
those that merely entertain and those that encourage thoughtful discussion.

Two Kinds of Movies From "Happy Haneke"* by Anthony Lane

As a rough rule, cinema can be sundered into two halves: six o’clock films and nine o’clock films. Most
movies are nine o’clock affairs, and none the worse for it. You get home from work, grab something to eat,
head to the theatre, and enjoy the show. And so to bed--alone or entwined, but, either way, with dreams whose
sweetness will not be crumbled or soured by what you saw onscreen. A six o’clock movie requires more
organization: prebooked tickets, a restaurant table, the right friends. You’re going to need them, because if all
runs according to plan you will spend the second half of the evening tossing the movie--the impact and the
substance of it--back and forth. So Persona is a six o’clock movie, though it won’t leave you with much of an
appetite. As is The Deer Hunter, whereas Platoon, for all its sound and fury, works fine for nine o’clock. The
Reader is a nine o’clock movie that thinks it’s a six o’clock. Groundhog Day is the opposite. And The White
Ribbon? A six-o'clock movie, if ever I saw one.

*"Happy Haneke" by Anthony Lane was published in the October 5, 2009 issue of The New Yorker magazine.

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Award-winning essayist and novelist Gretel Ehrlich has said that she's happiest when outdoors, whether on a
ranch in Wyoming (The Solace of Open Spaces) or an ice sheet in Greenland (This Cold Heaven). In this
paragraph from her first book, she compares two American sports, one distinctly regional, the other national.

Rodeo and Baseball – Comparison in The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich*

Rodeo, like baseball, is an American sport and has been around almost as long. While Henry Chadwick
was writing his first book of rules for the fledgling ball clubs in 1858, ranch hands were paying $25 a dare to a
kid who would ride five outlaw horses from the rough string in a makeshift arena of wagons and cars. The first
commercial rodeo in Wyoming was held in Lander in 1895, just nineteen years after the National League was
formed. Baseball was just as popular as bucking and roping contests in the West, but no one in Cooperstown,
New York, was riding broncs. And that's been part of the problem. After 124 years, rodeo is still misunderstood.
Unlike baseball, it's a regional sport (although they do have rodeos in New Jersey, Florida, and other eastern
states); it's derived from and stands for the western way of life and the western spirit. It doesn't have the
universal appeal of a sport contrived solely for the competition and winning; there is no ball bandied about
between opposing players.

*Gretel Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces was published by Viking Penguin in 1985.

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Best known for his autobiographical studies of English village life in Cider with
Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Laurie Lee also wrote poems,
plays, essays, and travel books. In this excerpt from the essay "Appetite," Lee uses a
then-and-now comparison to illustrate his thesis: "One of the major pleasures in life
is appetite, and one of our major duties should be to protect it."

from "Appetite"* by Laurie Lee

Fasting is an act of homage to the majesty of appetite. So I think we should arrange to give up our
pleasures regularly--our food, our friends, our lovers--in order to preserve their intensity, and the moment of
coming back to them. For this is the moment that renews and refreshes both oneself and the thing one loves.
Sailors and travelers enjoyed this once, and so did hunters, I suppose. Part of the weariness of modern life may
be that we live too much on top of each other, and are entertained and fed too regularly. Once we were
separated by hunger both from our food and families, and then we learned to value both. The men went off
hunting, and the dogs went with them; the women and children waved goodbye. The cave was empty of men for
days on end; nobody ate, or knew what to do. The women crouched by the fire, the wet smoke in their eyes; the
children wailed; everybody was hungry. Then one night there were shouts and the barking of dogs from the
hills, and the men came back loaded with meat. This was the great reunion, and everybody gorged themselves
silly, and appetite came into its own; the long-awaited meal became a feast to remember and an almost sacred
celebration of life. Now we go off to the office and come home in the evenings to cheap chicken and frozen
peas. Very nice, but too much of it, too easy and regular, served up without effort or wanting. We eat, we are
lucky, our faces are shining with fat, but we don’t know the pleasure of being hungry any more.
Too much of anything--too much music, entertainment, happy snacks, or time spent with one’s friends--
creates a kind of impotence of living by which one can no longer hear, or taste, or see, or love, or remember.
Life is short and precious, and appetite is one of its guardians, and loss of appetite is a sort of death. So if we are
to enjoy this short life we should respect the divinity of appetite, and keep it eager and not too much blunted.

*"The essay "Appetite" by Laurie Lee appears in the collection I Can't Stay Too Long, published by Atheneum
in 1976.

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Humorist Jean Shepherd is probably best known as the narrator of A

Christmas Story (1983), a film based on a number of his autobiographical short
stories. His distinctive colloquial prose style grew out of the yarns he frequently told
on late-night radio during his many years as a broadcaster.
Here, in the essay-like introduction to his short story "The Endless Streetcar
Ride," Shepherd relies on hyperbole to develop a memorable contrast between
"them" and "us"--the "stars" and the "numberless ciphers."

from "The Endless Streetcar Ride Into the Night, and the Tinfoil Noose" by Jean Shepherd

Mewling, puking babes. That's the way we all start. Damply clinging to someone's shoulder, burping
weakly, clawing our way into life. All of us. Then gradually, surely, we begin to divide into two streams, all
marching together up that long yellow brick road of life, but on opposite sides of the street. One crowd goes on
to become the Official people, peering out at us from television screens; magazine covers. They are forever
appearing in newsreels, carrying attaché cases, surrounded by banks of microphones while the world waits for
their decisions and statements. And the rest of us go on to become . . . just us.
They are the Prime Ministers, the Presidents, Cabinet members, Stars, dynamic molders of the Universe,
while we remain forever the onlookers, the applauders of their real lives.
Forever down in the dark dungeons of our souls we ask ourselves:
"How did they get away from me? When did I make that first misstep that took me forever to the wrong
side of the street, to become eternally part of the accursed, anonymous Audience?"
It seems like one minute we're all playing around back of the garage, kicking tin cans and yelling at
girls, and the next instant you find yourself doomed to exist as an office boy in the Mail Room of Life, while
another ex-mewling, puking babe sends down dicta, says "No comment" to the Press, and lives a real genuine
Life on the screen of the world.
Countless sufferers at this hour are spending billions of dollars and endless man hours lying on analysts'
couches, trying to pinpoint the exact moment that they stepped off the track and into the bushes forever.
It all hinges on one sinister reality that is rarely mentioned, no doubt due to its implacable, irreversible
inevitability. These decisions cannot be changed, no matter how many brightly cheerful, buoyantly optimistic
books on HOW TO ACHIEVE A RICHER, FULLER, MORE BOUNTIFUL LIFE or SEVEN MAGIC
GOLDEN KEYS TO INSTANT DYNAMIC SUCCESS or THE SECRET OF HOW TO BECOME A
BILLIONAIRE we read, or how many classes are attended for instruction in handshaking, back-slapping,
grinning, and making After-Dinner speeches. Joseph Stalin was not a Dale Carnegie graduate. He went all the
way. It is an unpleasant truth that is swallowed, if at all, like a rancid, bitter pill. A star is a star; a numberless
cipher is a numberless cipher.
Even more eerie a fact is that the Great Divide is rarely a matter of talent or personality. Or even luck.
Adolf Hitler had a notoriously weak handshake. His smile was, if anything, a vapid mockery. But inevitably his
star zoomed higher and higher. Cinema luminaries of the first order are rarely blessed with even the modicum
of Talent, and often their physical beauty leaves much to be desired. What is the difference between Us and
Them, We and They, the Big Ones and the great, teeming rabble?
There are about four times in a man's life, or a woman's, too, for that matter, when unexpectedly, from
out of the darkness, the blazing carbon lamp, the cosmic searchlight of Truth shines full upon them. It is how
we react to those moments that forever seals our fate. One crowd simply puts on its sunglasses, lights another
cigar, and heads for the nearest plush French restaurant in the jazziest section of town, sits down and orders a
drink, and ignores the whole thing. While we, the Doomed, caught in the brilliant glare of illumination, see
ourselves inescapably for what we are, and from that day on sulk in the weeds, hoping no one else will spot us.
"The Endless Streetcar Ride Into the Night, and the Tinfoil Noose" appears in Jean Shepherd's In God
We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, first published by Doubleday in 1966 and reprinted in paperback by Main
Street Books in 1991.
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Born in Ireland and raised in the Netherlands, novelist Joseph O'Neill practiced law in
England for ten years before moving to New York City, where he now writes for The Atlantic
Monthly and plays for the Staten Island Cricket Club. His novel Netherland was nominated for
the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
In this paragraph from Netherland, O'Neill's narrator recalls a cricket game played in a
New York City park one summer afternoon. The coordinated words, phrases, and clauses not
only advance the action but evoke a mood of increasing tension.

from Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

The men from St. Kitts batted for just over two hours. Throughout their innings their supporters
maintained the usual hullabaloo of laughter and heckling and wisecracks from the field’s east boundary, where
they congregated in the leaves’ shadows and drank rum out of paper cups and ate barbecued red snapper and
chicken. "Beat the ball!" they shouted, and "The man chucking!" and, raising their arms into the scarecrow pose
that signals a wide ball, "Wide, umpire, wide!" Our turn came to bat. As the innings wore on and the game grew
tighter and more and more rum was drunk, the musical din started up again from the Toyota, where men had
gathered once again, and the shouting of the spectators grew more emotional. In this atmosphere, by no means
rare for New York cricket, the proceedings on and off the field became more and more combative. At a certain
moment the visitors fell prey to the suspicion, apparently never far from the mind of cricketers in that city, that
a conspiracy to rob them of victory was afoot, and the appeals of the fielders ("How’s that, umpire? Ump!")
assumed a bitter, disputatious character, and a fight nearly broke out between a fielder in the deep and an
onlooker who had said something.

Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill, is published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate (2008) and in the United States by
Pantheon Books (2008).

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"I like style," George Saunders once told an interviewer. "I like to sound odd and, hopefully,
unique." In the following two paragraphs from his short story "The Falls," Saunders
achieves that distinction through cumulative sentences. In both the first paragraph (which is
one long sentence) and the final sentence in paragraph two, he starts out with a simple
statement an d then accumulates details that serve to amplify, qualify, and describe what
has come before.

from "The Falls"* by George Saunders

The school sat among maples on a hillside that sloped down to the wide Taganac River, which narrowed
and picked up speed and crashed over Bryce Falls a mile downstream near Morse's small rental house, his
embarrassingly small rental house, actually, which nevertheless was the best he could do and for which he knew
he should be grateful although at times he wasn't a bit grateful and wondered where he'd gone wrong, although
at other times he was quite pleased with the crooked little blue shack covered with peeling lead paint and felt
great pity for the poor stiffs renting hazardous shitholes even smaller than his hazardous shithole, which was
how he felt now as he came down into the bright sunlight and continued his pleasant walk home along the green
river lined with expensive mansions whose owners he deeply resented.
Morse was tall and thin and as gray and sepulchral as a church about to be condemned. His pants were
too short, and his face periodically broke into a tense, involuntary grin that quickly receded, as if he had just
suffered a sharp pain. At work he was known to punctuate his conversations with brief wild laughs and gusts of
inchoate enthusiasm and subsequent embarrassment, expressed by a sudden plunging of the hands into his
pockets, after which he would yank his hands out of his pockets, too ashamed of his own shame to stand there
merely grimacing for even an instant longer.

* Published originally in The New Yorker magazine, "The Falls" appears in the short story collection Pastoralia
by George Saunders (Riverhead, 2000).

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Born in Leicester, England, Julian Barnes worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford
English Dictionary before becoming a literary critic and author. He has published more
than a dozen novels (including crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh) and
has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize.
In this excerpt from "MPTV," an essay about the televised proceedings of the
House of Commons ("the best show in town"), Barnes defines the essential
characteristics of the pantomime, a form of popular theater in England since the 16th
century. "The British," Barnes says, "have managed to export some surprising things--
cricket, marmalade, the humor of Benny Hill--but they have never succeeded in
unloading the New Year pantomime on anyone else."

from MPTV* by Julian Barnes

The panto has its historical roots in the harlequinade and was cross-fertilized by the Victorian music
hall. In essence, it consists of a fairy tale--the story of Cinderella, Mother Goose, Alladin, Dick Whittington--
that, while drawing on a traditional narrative line, is constantly updated by topical references, often of a satirical
nature. Its central modes are farce and melodrama, with large openings for the miraculous and the sentimental;
it aims itself simultaneously at small children, who follow its twists with an awesome directness of response,
and at their accompanying parents, who are wooed by coarse double entendres supposedly above the heads of
their offspring. It includes two elements with powerful appeal to the British: cross-dressing (the principal boy is
always played by a girl, and the Pantomime Dame by a middle-aged man) and comic animals (who aren't
played by themselves, either). It retains, if in an attenuated form, a worldview by which Britannia rules the
waves and foreigners are are a humorous supporting act. Finally, it boasts a promiscuous permeability to
modern culture, so that at any moment the stage is likely to be invaded by some two-minute television cult that
the parents have barely caught on to. Darth Vader outfits jostle with TV magicians, old Empire racism with
Green jokes, and all is resolved with much audience participation and a join-in-or-die singsong. Perhaps, on
reflection, it isn't too surprising that the panto hasn't caught on in other countries.
It has always been a ramshackle, catchall, demotic genre. Parents returning to their first panto since they
themselves were kids are apt to bemoan the debasement of this popular old British art form, but the truth is that
it has always been debased--that's to say, various, eclectic, vulgar, referential, and topical. Whether one panto is
actually "better" than any other is almost impossible for an adult eye to judge. Perhaps more to the point is that
the pantomime is usually a child's first introduction to the theater, and that the allure of the tiered darkness,
velvet curtains, and interval ice cream seems undiminished and undiminishable. Amazingly, the pantomime
doesn't put kids off the theater for life.

* First published as "Letter from London" in The New Yorker magazine, March 5, 1990, "MPTV" was
reprinted in Letters from London, by Julian Barnes (Vintage Books, 1995).

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One of America's most popular writers of science fiction and fantasy, Ray
Bradbury has been entertaining readers for almost 70 years. Many of his novels and
stories--including Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, and
Something Wicked This Way Comes--have been adapted into feature-length films.
In this passage from Dandelion Wine (1957), a semi-autobiographical novel
set in the summer of 1928, a young boy describes the family ritual of gathering on the
porch after supper--a practice "so good, so easy and so reassuring that it could never
be done away with."

Summer Rituals from Dandelion Wine* by Ray Bradbury

About seven o’clock you could hear the chairs scraping back from the tables, someone experimenting
with a yellow-toothed piano, if you stood outside the dining-room window and listened. Matches being struck,
the first dishes bubbling in the suds and tinkling on the wall racks, somewhere, faintly, a phonograph playing.
And then as the evening changed the hour, at house after house on the twilight streets, under the immense oaks
and elms, on shady porches, people would begin to appear, like those figures who tell good or bad weather in
rain-or-shine clocks.
Uncle Bert, perhaps Grandfather, then Father, and some of the cousins; the men all coming out first into
the syrupy evening, blowing smoke, leaving the women’s voices behind in the cooling-warm kitchen to set their
universe aright. Then the first male voices under the porch brim, the feet up, the boys fringed on the worn steps
or wooden rails where sometime during the evening something, a boy or a geranium pot, would fall off.
At last, like ghosts hovering momentarily behind the door screen, Grandma, Great-grandma, and Mother
would appear, and the men would shift, move, and offer seats. The women carried varieties of fans with them,
folded newspapers, bamboo whisks, or perfumed kerchiefs, to start the air moving about their faces as they
talked.
What they talked of all evening long, no one remembered next day. It wasn’t important to anyone what
the adults talked about; it was only important that the sounds came and went over the delicate ferns that
bordered the porch on three sides; it was only important that the darkness filled the town like black water being
poured over the houses, and that the cigars glowed and that the conversations went on, and on. . . .
Sitting on the summer-night porch was so good, so easy and so reassuring that it could never be done
away with. These were rituals that were right and lasting: the lighting of pipes, the pale hands that moved
knitting needles in the dimness, the eating of foil-wrapped, chill Eskimo Pies, the coming and going of all the
people.

* Ray Bradbury's novel Dandelion Wine was originally published by Bantam Books in 1957. It is currently
available in the U.S. in a hardcover edition published by William Morrow (1999), and in the U.K. in a
paperback edition published by HarperVoyager (2008).

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Recognized by John Updike as the best essayist of his generation, Edward

Hoagland is especially well known for his nature and travel writing. This passage,
however, is drawn from an essay on boxing--a "waning sport," says Hoagland,
and one of the most "poignant ways to earn a living." Here he describes the old
Gramercy Gym on East 14th Street in Manhattan.

The Gramercy Gym from "Heart's Desire," by Edward Hoagland*

The Gramercy Gym is two flights up some littered, lightless stairs that look like a mugger's paradise,
though undoubtedly they are the safest stairs in New York. Inside, two dozen bodies are chopping up and down,
self-clocked, each fellow cottoned in his dreams. Some are skipping rope, turbaned in towels, wrapped in robes
in order to sweat. These are white-looking figures, whereas the men who are about to spar have on dark
headguards that close grimly around the face like an executioner's hood. There are floor-length mirrors and
mattresses for exercising and rubdowns, and two speedbags banging like drums, and three heavy bags swinging
even between the rounds with the momentum of more than a decade of punches. The bell is loud, the fighters
jerk like eating and walking birds, hissing through their teeth as they punch, their feet sneakering the floor with
shuffly sounds. They wear red shoelaces in white shoes, and peanut-colored gloves, or if they're Irish they're in
green. They are learning to move their feet to the left and right, to move in and out, punching over, then under
an opponent's guard, and other repetitive skills without which a man in the ring becomes a man of straw. The
speedbags teach head-punching, the heavy bags teach body work, and one bag pinned to the wall has both a
head and a torso diagrammed, complete with numbers, so that the trainer can shout out what punches his fighter
should throw. "Bounce, bounce!" the trainers yell.

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The memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) recounts the experiences of the Wakatsuki family
at an American internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II. In this
excerpt, Jeanne Wakatsuki, just seven years old at the time of her imprisonment, provides a
clear-eyed description of the "shack" in which the family was forced to live for almost three
years.

From Farewell to Manzanar* by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston

After dinner we were taken to Block 16, a cluster of fifteen barracks that had just been finished a day or
so earlier--although finished was hardly the word for it. The shacks were built of one thickness of pine planking
covered with tarpaper. They sat on concrete footings, with about two feet of open space between the floorboards
and the ground. Gaps showed between the planks, and as the weeks passed and the green wood dried out, the
gaps widened. Knotholes gaped in the uncovered floor.
Each barracks was divided into six units, sixteen by twenty feet, about the size of a living room, with
one bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and an oil stove for heat. We were assigned two of these for the twelve
people in our family group; and our official family “number” was enlarged by three digits--16 plus the number
of this barracks. We were issued steel army cots, two brown army blankets each, and some mattress covers,
which my brothers stuffed with straw.
The first task was to divide up what space we had for sleeping. Bill and Woody contributed a blanket
each and partitioned off the first room: one side for Bill and Tomi, one side for Woody and Chizu and their
baby girl. Woody also got the stove, for heating formulas.
The people who had it hardest during the first few months were young couples, many of whom had
married just before the evacuation began, in order not to be separated and sent to different camps. Our two
rooms were crowded, but at least it was all in the family. My oldest sister and her husband were shoved into one
of those sixteen-by-twenty-foot compartments with six people they had never seen before--two other couples,
one recently married like themselves, the other with two teenage boys. Partitioning off a room like that wasn't
easy. It was bitter cold when we arrived, and the wind did not abate. All they had to use for room dividers were
those army blankets, two of which were barely enough to keep one person warm. They argued over whose
blanket should be sacrificed and later argued about noise at night--the parents wanted their boys asleep by 9:00
p.m.--and they continued arguing over matters like that for six months, until my sister and her husband left to
harvest sugar beets in Idaho. It was grueling work up there, and wages were pitiful, but when the call came
through camp for workers to alleviate the wartime labor shortage, it sounded better than their life at Manzanar.
They knew they'd have, if nothing else, a room, perhaps a cabin of their own.

*The memoir Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston was originally
published by Houghton Mifflin in 1973. It is currently available in a paperback edition published by Bantam
Books.

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Biographer and theater critic John Lahr, the son of comic actor Bert Lahr, has been
composing profiles for The New Yorker magazine since 1992. The following
paragraph is drawn from the conclusion of his 10,000-word profile of David Mamet.
Notice how the description of the cabin where the playwright works, the references to
the books on his table, and the brief quotations from Mamet's sister and from Mamet
himself all serve to reveal aspects of character.

from "Fortress Mamet"* by John Lahr

Mamet types with his back to the window on a blue Olympia manual typewriter, above which a
kerosene lamp is suspended by a chain from a beam smudged with black smoke. The special calm of the place
is in part the peace of having no electricity; it is also the peace of the activity that goes on there. Writing has
always been Mamet's way of containing terror, or what he calls "mental vomit." "David's brain is a very busy
place. It's very cluttered," Lynn Mamet says. "Writing's the only thing that stops the thinking, you know,"
Mamet says. "It stops all that terrible noise that's in there." In "The Edge," where the billionaire bookworm
thinks himself out of the backwoods, Mamet quite literally shows the triumph of thought over terror. It's
something that he clearly works hard at in his own life. Across the room, on a table in front of the sofa, his
serious reading is laid out: D.W. Winnicott's "Thinking About Children"; a special Hebrew prayer about "the
good wife," whose twenty-two verses are traditionally read by the husband to his wife on holy days; and
Seneca's "Letters from a Stoic." Mamet has underlined only one passage in Seneca: "Each day . . . acquire
something which will help you to face poverty, or death, and other ills as well."

* David Mamet's profile of David Mamet appeared in the November 17, 1997 issue of The New Yorker
magazine and was reprinted in Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles (The Overlook Press, 2000).

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A poet, novelist, and playwright, Langston Hughes was one of the major figures of the
Harlem Renaissance. In the following passage from his autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes
describes how Harlem became a tourist destination for white New Yorkers during the 1920s.
Notice how his predominately paratactic style (along with his reliance on series in
paragraphs four and five) gives the writing a casual, conversational flavor. (For another
perspective on Harlem in the 1920s, see "The Making of Harlem," by James Weldon
Johnson.)

When the Negro Was in Vogue from The Big Sea* by Langston Hughes

White people began to come to Harlem in droves. For several years they packed the expensive Cotton
Club on Lenox Avenue. But I was never there, because the Cotton Club was a Jim Crow club for gangsters and
monied whites. They were not cordial to Negro patronage, unless you were a celebrity like Bojangles. So
Harlem Negroes did not like the Cotton Club and never appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of
their dark community. Nor did ordinary Negroes like the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after
sundown, flooding the little cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang, and where
now the strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers--like amusing
animals in a zoo.
The Negroes said: "We can't go downtown and sit and stare at you in your clubs. You won't even let us
in your clubs." But they didn't say it out loud--for Negroes are practically never rude to white people. So
thousands of whites came to Harlem night after night, thinking the Negroes loved to have them there, and firmly
believing that all Harlemites left their houses at sundown to sing and dance in cabarets, because most of the
whites saw nothing but the cabarets, not the houses.
Some of the owners of Harlem clubs, delighted at the flood of white patronage, made the grievous error
of barring their own race, after the manner of the famous Cotton Club. But most of these quickly lost business
and folded up, because they failed to realize that a large part of the Harlem attraction for downtown New
Yorkers lay in simply watching the colored customers amuse themselves. And the smaller clubs, of course, had
no big floor shows or a name band like the Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington usually held forth, so, without
black patronage, they were not amusing at all.
Some of the small clubs, however, had people like Gladys Bentley, who was something worth
discovering in those days, before she got famous, acquired an accompanist, specially written material, and
conscious vulgarity. But for two or three amazing years, Miss Bentley sat, and played a big piano all night long,
literally all night, without stopping--singing songs like "St. James Infirmary," from ten in the evening until
dawn, with scarcely a break between the notes, sliding from one song to another, with a powerful and
continuous under beat of jungle rhythm. Miss Bentley was an amazing exhibition of musical energy--a large,
dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard--a perfect piece of
African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm…
But when the place where she played became too well known, she began to sing with an accompanist,
became a star, moved to a larger place, then downtown, and is now in Hollywood. The old magic of the woman
and the piano and the night and the rhythm being one is gone. But everything goes, one way or the other. The
'20s are gone and lots of fine things in Harlem night life have disappeared like snow in the sun--since it became
utterly commercial, planned for the downtown tourist trade, and therefore dull.

* The Big Sea, by Langston Hughes, was originally published by Knopf in 1940 and reprinted by Hill and
Wang in 1993.

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Born in St. Louis and then reared by her grandmother in the segregated community
of Stamps, Arkansas, Maya Angelou overcame great adversities in her "roller-coaster life"
to become a successful writer, dancer, singer, and African-American activist. The passages
here have been drawn from Chapter 22 of the first volume of her autobiography, I Know
Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970).
In these paragraphs, Angelou recalls the first funeral that she attended as a child,
that of Mrs. Florida Taylor, a neighbor who had left young Maya a "yellow brooch." The
ritual that Angelou describes also marked the girl's first recognition of her own mortality.

from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) by Maya Angelou

The mourners on the front benches sat in a blue-serge, black-crepe-dress gloom. A funeral hymn made
its way around the church tediously but successfully. It eased into the heart of every gay thought, into the care
of each happy memory. Shattering the light and hopeful: "On the other side of Jordan, there is a peace for the
weary, there is a peace for me." The inevitable destination of all living things seemed but a short step away. I
had never considered before that dying, death, dead, passed away, were words and phrases that might be even
faintly connected with me.
But on that onerous day, oppressed beyond relief, my own mortality was borne in upon me on sluggish
tides of doom.
No sooner had the mournful song run its course than the minister took to the altar and delivered a
sermon that in my state gave little comfort. Its subject was, "Thou art my good and faithful servant with whom I
am well pleased." His voice enweaved itself through the somber vapors left by the dirge. In a monotonous tone
he warned the listeners that "this day might be your last," and the best insurance against dying a sinner was to
"make yourself right with God" so that on the fateful day He would say, "Thou art my good and faithful servant
with whom I am well pleased." . . .
Mr. Taylor and the high church officials were the first to file around the bier to wave farewell to the
departed and get a glimpse of what lay in store for all men. Then on heavy feet, made more ponderous by the
guilt of the living viewing the dead, the adult church marched up to the coffin and back to their seats. Their
faces, which showed apprehension before reaching the coffin, revealed, on the way down the opposite aisle, a
final confrontation of their fears. Watching them was a little like peeping through a window when the shade is
not drawn flush. Although I didn't try, it was impossible not to record their roles in the drama.
And then a black-dressed usher stuck her hand out woodenly toward the children's rows. There was the
shifty rustling of unreadiness but finally a boy of fourteen led us off and I dared not hang back, as much as I
hated the idea of seeing Mrs. Taylor. Up the aisle, the moans and screams merged with the sickening smell of
woolen black clothes worn in summer weather and green leaves wilting over yellow flowers. I couldn't
distinguish whether I was smelling the clutching sound of misery or hearing the cloying odor of death.
It would have been easier to see her through the gauze, but instead I looked down on the stark face that
seemed suddenly so empty and evil. It knew secrets that I never wanted to share.

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The author of several essay collections and a regular contributor to the Chicago
Public Radio program This American Life, David Sedaris has been described as "the
most brilliantly witty New Yorker since Dorothy Parker." In this excerpt from his
essay "Naked," an account of a week-long visit to a nudist colony, Sedaris describes
his living quarters and the surrounding neighborhood.

A Nudist Trailer Park from "Naked," by David Sedaris*

My trailer's main room is paneled with artificial walnut planks, and the low, fiberglass tiled ceiling is
stained with water marks. A linoleum floor separates the kitchen area from the carpeted living room, which is
furnished with a worn gold velvet sofa and two matching easy chairs that face a low table bearing the scuff
marks of a now absent television set. Two of the walls are lined with windows, and the other supports a large,
ornamental carpet picturing a family of polar bears occupying an ice flow. My bedroom, like that of my
potential roommate's, is cell-like in both its size and simplicity, furnished with only a bed and a small chest of
drawers that easily accommodates the little I brought with me.
By the time I'd unpacked and put away my groceries, it was early evening and the rain had stopped.
After staring at the spot where the television used to be, I took a walk past the clubhouse and up into the park's
more established neighborhoods. These were mobile homes that had been soundly grounded upon carefully
manicured lots, many with built-on decks made of pine and redwood. Some of the trailers had been sided to
resemble log cabins, and others were fronted by shingled, A-framed entrance halls. The homeowners' names
were displayed on wooden plaques along with slogans such as "Bare with us" or "Smile if you talk naked!"
Flowerbeds were marked with wooden cutouts of bare-bottomed pint-size children and silhouettes of shapely,
naked women were painted onto the doors of tool sheds and nailed like FOR SALE signs onto the trees. Most
everyone seemed to have a golf cart parked in the driveway, and these, too, were personalized with bumper
stickers and hand-painted slogans. I passed a sign reading SHEEP CROSSING 20 FEET and came across a
trailer whose lawn played host to a flock of artificial sheep tended to by an oversized, bonneted doll equipped
with a crooked staff. Time had not been kind to the shepherdess, nor to her charges, whose waterlogged wool
was stained with the evidence of a long and unforgiving winter. Farther along the road these homes gave way to
tents and campers equipped with pop-up roofs and jury-rigged awnings made of plastic and fronted by mosquito
netting. The lack of space had forced both the kitchens and bathrooms outdoors, and the yards were home to
outhouses and picnic tables surrounded by coolers and grills that sat positioned beneath festive paper lanterns.
A trailer door opened and a young woman stepped out, leading a child who beat upon her legs with a wooden
spoon. The woman was topless, and her breasts hung like two kneesocks, each stuffed with a single orange. I
knew when I signed up that I would encounter exposed breasts, but this being my first pair, I reacted with
alarm. She wore her hair in a neglected shag and scolded the child for a moment or two before gathering him up
in her arms and burying her sharp-featured face in his stomach. Topless. She was topless, walking the streets of
what amounted to her neighborhood. The boy howled with pleasure and then rapped her over the head with his
spoon.

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Although he has published ten popular novels and two collections of short stories,
Pete Hamill is probably best known as a (many would say the) great New York City
newspaperman. He has served as editor-in-chief of both the New York Post and the
Daily News, and has written columns for almost every major newspaper and magazine in
the city.
In his memoir A Drinking Life (1994), Hamill re-creates everyday life in Brooklyn
and Manhattan during the 1940s and '50s. This passage, set in the days immediately
following the end of World War II, describes the rules and rituals of a once popular New
York City street game.

Stickball in New York from A Drinking Life, by Pete Hamill*

In the streets, we still played the now forgotten games of the New York summers. Stickball was the
supreme game, a kind of tabloid version of baseball, played with a broom handle as a bat and a pink rubber ball
manufactured by the A. G. Spalding Co. In every street in New York, this ball was called a spaldeen. The
spaldeens had vanished during the war and the game was played for awhile with hairy tennis balls, until even
they had disappeared. But coming home from Fox Lair Camp, I felt a special excitement spreading through the
neighborhood: Spaldeens are back! . . .

Stickball ruled us. On Saturday mornings, the older guys played big games against visitors from other
neighborhoods or went off themselves to play beyond our frontiers. Money game! someone would shout, and
suddenly we were all moving to the appointed court and the great noisy fiesta of the stickball morning. The
players drank beer from cardboard containers on the sidelines and ate hero sandwiches and smoked cigarettes.
They were cheered by neighbors, girlfriends, wives, and kids. And standing on the sidelines during those first
games were the veterans, holding the spaldeens, bouncing them, smelling them in an almost sacramental way.

The men played on summer weekends; we kids played every day. There were still very few cars on the
streets in that year after the war, so the "court" was always perfectly drawn, with sewer plates marking home
and second base, while first and third were chalked against the curbs. The rules were settled before each game:
one strike and you were out; off the factory wall or off a passing trolley car was a "hindoo"--which meant the
play didn't count. The great hitters could hit the ball at least "three sewers," and it was said of Paulie McAleer of
the Shamrock Boys that he once hit a ball an incredible five sewers. In memory, the games seem continuous and
the days longer, richer, denser, and emptier than any others in my life. We did nothing and we did everything.
You would wake, the radio playing, the rooms thick with the closed heat (and sometimes the sour smell of
drink), grab something to eat--bread and butter covered with sugar, a piece of toast--and then race down the
stairs, to burst into the streets. On a perfect Saturday in August, Twelfth Street would be wet from the water
wagon, the air fresh, nobody else around, the tenements brooding in Edward Hopper light, and then a door
would open and Billy Rossiter would appear with the bat and the spaldeen, and that was all we needed. We'd
play off the factory walls until the others came down; we'd play ten hits a piece until there were enough players
to choose up sides. And then we'd play until dark.

* Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life was published in 1994 by Little, Brown and Company.

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Since its publication in 1982, Blue Highways has become a significant part of
American travel literature. In the book, William Least Heat-Moon (the pen name of
William Trogdon) explores the country's backroads "in search of places where change
did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected."
In this passage from Chapter 14 of Blue Highways, Least Heat-Moon describes a
cafe in Darlington, South Carolina. Note his reliance on detailed lists to convey a sense
of place.

The Deluxe Cafe in Darlington from Blue Highways* by William Least Heat-Moon

Then Darlington, a town of portico and pediment, iron fences, big trees, and an old courthouse square
that looked as though renovated by a German buzz bomb. But on the west side of the square stood the Deluxe
Cafe. The times had left it be. The front window said AIR CONDITIONED in icy letters, above the door was
neon, and inside hung an insurance agency calendar and another for an auto parts store. Also on the walls were
the Gettysburg Address, Declaration of Independence, Pledge of Allegiance, a picture of a winged Jesus
ushering along two kids who belonged in a Little Rascals film, and the obligatory waterfall lithograph. The
clincher: small, white, hexagonal floor tiles. Two old men, carrying their arms folded behind, stopped to greet
each other with a light, feminine touching of fingertips, a gesture showing the duration of their friendship. I
went in happy.
I expected a grandmother, wiping her hands on a gingham apron, to come from the kitchen. Instead I got
Brenda. Young, sullen, pink uniform, bottlecaps for eyes, handling her pad the way a cop does his citation book.
The menu said all breakfasts came with grits, toast, and preserves. I ordered a breakfast of two eggs over easy.
"Is that all you want?"
"Doesn't it come with grits and so forth?"
"Does if you ast fort."
"I want the complete, whole thing. Top to bottom."
She snapped the pad closed. I waited. I read the rest of the menu, the Gettysburg Address, made a quick
run over the Pledge of Allegiance, read about famous American women on four sugar packets, read a
matchbook and the imprints on the flatware. I was counting grains of rice in the saltshaker (this was the South),
when Brenda pushed a breakfast at me, the check slick with margarine and propped between slices of toast. The
food was good and the sense of the place fine, but Brenda was destined for an interstate run-em-thru. Early in
life she had developed the ability to make a customer wish he'd thrown up on himself rather than disturb her.

* Blue Highways: A Journey Into America by William Least Heat-Moon was published by Little, Brown and
Company in 1982. The book is currently available in a paperback edition published by Back Bay Books (1999).

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In this paragraph from the essay "Me and My Bike and Why," American novelist
Thomas McGuane describes his first motorcycle.

Matchless 500 from "Me and My Bike and Why"* by Thomas McGuane

Unwatched, I can really examine the bike. Since I have no notion of how to
operate it, it is purely an object. I think of a friend with a road racer on a simple
mahogany block in front of his fireplace, except that he rides his very well. The bike
was rather beautiful. I suppose it still is. (Are you out there? If you read this, get in touch care of this magazine.
All is forgiven.) The designation, which now seems too cryptic for my taste, was "Matchless 500," and it was
the motorcycle I believed I had thought up myself. It is a trifle hard to describe the thing to the uninitiated, but,
briefly, it had a 500-cc., one-cylinder engine--a "big single" in the patois of bike freaks--and an eloquently
simple maroon teardrop-shaped tank that is as much the identifying mark on a Matchless, often otherwise
unrecognizable through modification, as the chevron of a redwing blackbird. The front wheel, delicate as a
bicycle's, carried a Dunlop K70 tire (said to "cling") and had no fender; a single cable led to the pale machined
brake drum. Over the knobby rear curved an extremely brief magnesium fender with, instead of the lush buddy-
seat of the fat motorcycles, a minute pillion of leather. The impression was of performance and of complete
disregard for comfort. The equivalent in automobiles would be, perhaps, the Morgan, in sailboats the Finn.

*Originally published in Sports Illustrated (Feb. 21, 1972) as "Finally, Just Me and My Bike," the essay "Me
and My Bike and Why" was reprinted in the collection An Outside Chance: Essays on Sport by Thomas
McGuane (Houghton Mifflin, 1980; revised 1990).

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Though more highly regarded for his themes of social conflict than for his prose style,
American novelist Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) had a reporter's eye for detail. In this
paragraph from Chapter 15 of The Genius, Dreiser conveys a new arrival's feelings of
excitement and isolation in early 20th-century Manhattan.

from The Genius* by Theodore Dreiser

He went about this early relationship to the city in the right spirit. For a little while he did not try to
think what he would do, but struck out and walked here, there, and everywhere, this very first day down
Broadway to the City Hall and up the Broadway from 14th to 42nd Street the same night. Soon he knew all
Third Avenue and the Bowery, the wonders of Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive, the beauties of the East River,
the Battery, Central Park and the Lower East Side. He sought out quickly the wonders of metropolitan life--its
crowds at dinner and theater time in Broadway, its tremendous throngs morning and afternoon in the shopping
district, its amazing world of carriages in Fifth Avenue and Central Park. He had marveled at wealth and luxury
in Chicago, but here it took his breath away. It was obviously so much more fixed, so definite and
comprehensible. Here one felt instinctively the far reaches which separate the ordinary man from the scion of
wealth. It curled him up like a frozen leaf, dulled his very soul, and gave him a clear sense of his position in the
social scale. He had come here with a pretty high estimate of himself, but daily, as he looked, he felt himself
crumbling. What was he? What was art? What did the city care? It was much more interested in other things, in
dressing, eating, visiting, riding abroad. The lower part of the island was filled with cold commercialism which
frightened him. In the upper half, which concerned only women and show--a voluptuous sybaritism--caused
him envy. He had but two hundred dollars with which to fight his way, and this was the world he must conquer.

* The "Genius," by Theodore Dreiser, was first published by the John Lane Company in 1915, reprinted by
Kessinger Publishing in 2004.

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One of the most influential as well as controversial British journalists of his

era, Bernard Levin was a columnist for The Times from 1971 until 1997. He was a
devotee of H.L. Mencken, a fierce debater, an unashamed intellectual, and a
masterful stylist. His greatest gift, said fellow journalist Alan Watkins, "was to
overcome the inhibitions which the written word presents; get over a barrier; acquire
freedom and even fly." Well known for composing unusually long sentences (as
demonstrated in the passage below), he once wrote a 1,500-word column with only a
single period.
In this excerpt from Enthusiasms (1983), a discourse on the pleasures of his
life, Levin recalls a fortuitous encounter with failure in a woodworking class at boarding school.

From the Carpentry Shop to the Forge from Enthusiasms, by Bernard Levin

The woodwork teacher was a kindly soul. In what proved to be my last lesson in his class I was
attempting to make a simple office filing-tray. I had cut one of the long sides, and it had turned out rather better
than my usual efforts; or so it seemed to me, but in fact I had on that occasion surpassed myself in
incompetence, for I had sawn the wood straight across the grain. When the teacher, making his rounds of the
class, got to my bench he picked up the rectangle of wood and looked at it for a minute in silence, turning it this
way and that in his hands, as if he could not believe the evidence of his eyes, as perhaps he really couldn't. Then
he turned to me and, apparently in a spirit of genuine inquiry, asked, "Is this a joke?" I assured him it was not,
realizing a moment later that it might have been better if I had insisted that it was.
He nodded gravely, then took the slab between finger and thumb at both ends, snapped it in half, threw it
into the rubbish bin and bade me follow him to his dais at the end of the room, where he intimated to me, in the
most courteous terms, that he doubted if I would ever make a success of carpentry, a conclusion I had already
come to on my own behalf. I awaited news of my fate; I was not to know that what lay before me were perhaps
a hundred of the happiest and most satisfying hours of my entire life; indeed so piercing was the happiness
those hours gave me, that even now, as I conjure it up forty years later, I can feel it in all its power, and restrain
the tears with difficulty.
In addition to a carpentry shop, the school had a forge; the passer-by would hear the roaring of the
furnace and the bellows, the clang of iron, and see, whenever the door was opened, a Stygian gloom lit by the
fires of hell. Or so memory portrays it, and certainly the decision to transfer me from the comparative safety of
the woodwork class to the unimaginable perils of the forge struck me speechless with terror. But the forge was
an alternative to carpentry; one or the other was obligatory, and the woodwork teacher doubtless felt that I could
not be more hopeless with iron than I had shown myself to be with wood, and that at least he would be rid of
me. The next week, I reported to the forge; an enveloping leather apron was draped over me, I was shown how
to operate the mechanical bellows and the simpler tools, and given instruction in safety procedures. Then, under
careful guidance (possibly the woodwork teacher had passed the word along to his colleague in the smithy), I
heated a bar of metal red hot, laid it upon the anvil, and hammered it flat.
The most suitable way for this story to continue would be, I suppose, in the form of a revelation that I
turned out to be a metal worker of genius, culminating in a shy confession that it was I who made the iron
chandelier, forty feet in diameter and most elaborately chased, with a thousand fantastically decorated
candleholders, which hangs to this day in the nave of East Grinstead Cathedral. It is not so; I was quite as
hopeless with my hands in the forge as I had been at the carpenter's bench, and all I had to show at the end of all
my hours among the sparks and the furnace, my efforts twixt hammer and anvil, was a toasting-fork of
extremely irregular design. But I had stumbled upon one of the great, holy, all-consuming loves of my life: fire.
For additional specimens of Bernard Levin's prose, see Bernard Levin on Writers and Writing.

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Enthusiasms by Bernard Levin was published in Great Britain in 1983 by Jonathan Cape Ltd.; it was published
in the U.S. in 1984 by Crown Publishers.

Best known for his first novel (Lord of the Flies) and his final trilogy of allegorical
sea tales (collectively known as To the Ends of the Earth), British novelist William Golding
was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983. He originally delivered this encomium to the book in
a lecture in 1976--well before the arrival of laptops, Kindles, e-books, and other
competitors to wha t Golding calls "physical books."

from "A Moving Target"* by William Golding (1911-1993)

What a piece of work is a book! I am not talking about writing or printing. I am talking about the codex
we may leaf through, that may be put away on a shelf for whole centuries and will remain there, unchanged and
handy. We are so accustomed to crediting books with personality you will forgive my excursion into the
pathetic fallacy when I speak of books as lying to hand with the obedience and humility of all harmless and
useful beings. Of course, in a large library or bookshop we may see hundreds of yards of books and mutter,
"Good God--who would want ever to add to that lot?" But this is the reaction of surfeit. The book, the stack of
conveniently arranged pages, is an invention, in its physical nature as near as anything can be to remaining
beyond criticism. We have them so often before our eyes that we tend to forget the ingenuity concealed in their
apparent simplicity. Our world is voracious and still becoming more so. Sooner or later, unless we exercise a
care and forethought which is seldom evident in the mass of human beings, we shall be left with little more than
village or small town economy. It is worth noting, therefore, that the making of books can be a cottage industry.
If the need is there, anyone could learn that careful swirl of the tray and flick of the wrist that distributes the
pulp evenly over the mesh and gives us handmade paper. Flax, leather, cotton, silk--the heart warms at the
thought of them in our era of alloys and plastic. I say this because I sometimes hear people say that the age of
the book is past; and I suppose these statements to come from people who have a couple of thousand television
sets on their shelves. But it will be a very advanced village industry that can manufacture a television set. Tapes,
cassettes, records, radios, television sets are with us, certainly; but he would be a wise man who could predict
how long we shall be able to afford them. Nor have these objects beauty in themselves. I think of a book that I
bought for a few pence, second-hand. It is the Odyssey, published in 1800. It is printed on handmade paper and
in the most exquisite Greek fount of the early eighteenth century. I do not collect books for their rarity or beauty
but I come across such books sometimes. That one is a delight not just to the eye and the intellect but to the
hands, with its leather binding, still supple after more than a hundred and seventy years. A luckier friend bought
for only a few pounds a book within a few years of being five hundred years old. I held it in my hands, opened
it, and the immense words were there, still clearly to be read on the near-white page.
Would that the ship Argo had never sailed--
As long as we value the simple and the durable, the unobtrusively convenient, we shall make books
available to us. For they will hold in perpetuity something as dull as a date or as proud as a poem. There lies,
perhaps, some tedious record; or there will blaze out at us some passionate expression of the human spirit, not
dulled or obscured by time, but clear as ever it was. As long as we are physical human beings with an
inclination towards the acceptance of physical convenience and with a pleasure in touch and sight, there will be
physical books.

*"A Moving Target" by William Golding was originally delivered as an address to Les Anglicistes, Rouen,
France, on May 16, 1976. A slightly revised version of the lecture was included in the collection A Moving
Target, published in 1982 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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From 1922 to 1927, journalist and novelist George Orwell served in Burma
(now the Union of Myanmar) as a member of the Indian Imperial Police. Out of that
experience came the narrative essay "A Hanging"--though it's unlikely that Orwell
ever observed a hanging firsthand.
In the following two paragraphs, which appear midway through "A Hanging,"
the narrator shifts his point of view from that of a disinterested observer to one who
identifies intimately with the prisoner. In classical terms, this sort of identification is
known as ethopoeia.

from "A Hanging" (1931) by George Orwell

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front
of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who
never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced
up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by
each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.
When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of
cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the
organs of his body were working--bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming--
all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was
falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the gray walls, and
his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned--reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men
walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden
snap, one of us would be gone--one mind less, one world less.

"A Hanging" by George Orwell was first published in Adelphi, August 1931. In was reprinted in 1950 in
Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (UK edition, Secker and Warburg; US edition, Harcourt Brace & Co.).

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A renowned cultural critic and master of the familiar essay, Joseph Epstein was
for many years the editor of The American Scholar magazine and a lecturer in writing at
Northwestern University. In "You Take Manhattan" (published in The Middle of My
Tether, 1983), he describes the "permanent transience" and "jumpy rhythms" of the city
he called home for three years. In the following excerpt from that essay, Epstein employs
a series of witty examples to illustrate the outsized attitudes and aspirations of New
Yorkers.

from "You Take Manhattan"* by Joseph Epstein

There are eight million stories in the naked city, as an old television show used to announce, and, before
coming to New York to work, I had heard very few of them. I worked on 15th Street, off Union Square, in a
building that housed a number of union agents and the old Rand School Library. Hasidic Jews and elderly
Mensheviks pottered in and out of the building. In the library, men spent lifetimes getting up the material for
books no one wanted to read. I met a jazz critic, a teacher of literature courses at the School of General
Education at Columbia University, who referred to his job as "working the lounge at Columbia." More than half
the people I came across were at work on a novel, or painted, or sang, or danced. A pants salesman in our
apartment building gave up his line to take acting lessons. Accountants were sure to have been Trotskyists in
their youth. The city sagged under the weight of aspiration. Yet all this aspiration gave New York an appealing
aspect of hope and dreaminess.
The other side of this aspiration--a side that often puts off strangers--is the sheer appalling knowingness
of New Yorkers. Delicatessen countermen offer stock-market tips. Cabdrivers are flush with opinions on
everything. (Agnes Repplier tells how, many years ago, she once entered a New York cab and announced, "I
want to go to Brooklyn." "You mean," the driver corrected her, "you have to.") Even the New York bums seem
a bit sharper than their confreres in other cities. I was once stopped on Waverly Place by a youngish panhandler
who asked if he could have all my change. Thrown off balance by the originality of his request, I forked over a
dollar and twenty cents. But for simple knowingness, for being simultaneously with it, inside it, and yet above it
all, I shall never forget a man who one day sat in the chair alongside mine in a New York barbershop. When the
barber asked him if he was going to that Sunday's pro football game, he said he hated crowds, and besides they
piped the game into his club. Stock market looked bad, the barber said. He had got out last month, the man
replied. Supposed to have snowstorms next week, the barber said. He couldn't care less, the man replied; he was
off to Florida on Monday. If you told this man that his eyeballs had just dropped out, doubtless he would have
responded, no sweat, he had another pair in the car. Clearly, here was a man who, even in hell, would have an
air-conditioned room reserved.
In no other city does life seem such a perpetual balancing of debits and credits, of evils and virtues, as it
does in New York. No other city seems so charming yet so crude, so civilized yet so uncouth. I recall once
going out with two friends to bring back Chinese food from a restaurant on upper Broadway. With the food in
hand, we were stopped by a young Puerto Rican drugged to the hairline who wanted the wristwatch worn by
one of my friends. We were able to joke him out of it, but the prospect was fraught with danger. Such,
paradigmatically, is New York: the prospect of the delight of first-class Chinese food, the danger of having a
knife pulled on you while getting it home.* Originally published in The American Scholar, "You Take
Manhattan" was reprinted in The Middle of My Tether: Familiar Essays, by Joseph Epstein, W.W. Norton &
Company, 1983.

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American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most popular and
highly regarded science writers of the late 20th century. All 300 of the monthly columns
that he wrote for Natural History magazine were collected in books, and his numerous
awards include the National Book Award (1981), the Distinguished Scientist Award
(1997), Humanist of the Year (2001), and the Darwin-Wallace Medal (2008).
Gould was also a devoted baseball fan. In his essay "The Streak of Streaks" (first
published in The New York Review of Books in 1988), he explored the significance of Joe
Dimaggio's 56-game hitting streak in 1941, generally considered to be "the greatest
accomplishment in the history of baseball, if not all modern sport." In the follow excerpt
from that essay, Gould relies on examples and statistics to explain--and debunk--the
popular belief known as "hot hands," a version of the gambler's fallacy.

Hot Hands – From "The Streak of Streaks"* by Stephen Jay Gould

Start with a phenomenon that nearly everyone both accepts and considers well understood--"hot hands"
in basketball. Now and then, someone just gets hot, and can't be stopped. Basket after basket falls in--or out as
with "cold hands," when a man can't buy a bucket for love or money (choose your cliché). The reason for this
phenomenon is clear enough; it lies embodied in the maxim: "When you're hot, you're hot; and when you're not,
you're not." You get that touch, build confidence; all nervousness fades, you find your rhythm; swish, swish,
swish. Or you miss a few, get rattled, endure the booing, experience despair; hands start shaking and you realize
that you shoulda stood in bed.
Everybody knows about hot hands. The only problem is that no such phenomenon exists. The Stanford
psychologist Amos Tversky studied every basket made by the Philadelphia 76ers for more than a season. He
found, first of all, that probabilities of making a second basket did not rise following a successful shot.
Moreover, the number of "runs," or baskets in succession, was no greater than what a standard random, or coin-
tossing, model would predict. (If the chance of making each basket is 0.5, for example, a reasonable value for
good shooters, five hits in a row will occur, on average, once in thirty-two sequences--just as you can expect to
toss five successive heads about once in thirty-two times, or 0.5.)
Of course Larry Bird, the great forward of the Boston Celtics, will have more sequences of five than Joe
Airball--but not because he has greater will or gets in that magic rhythm more often. Larry has longer runs
because his average success rate is so much higher, and random models predict more frequent and longer
sequences. If Larry shoots field goals at 0.6 probability of success, he will get five in a row about once every
thirteen sequences (0.65). If Joe, by contrast, shoots only 0.3, he will get his five straight only about once in 412
times. In other words, we need no special explanation for the apparent pattern of long runs. There is no ineffable
"causality of circumstance" (if I may call it that), no definite reason born of the particulars that make for heroic
myths--courage in the clinch, strength in adversity, etc. You only have to know a person's ordinary play in order
to predict his sequences. (I rather suspect that we are convinced of the contrary not only because we need myths
so badly, but also because we remember the successes and simply allow the failures to fade from memory.)

*Stephen Jay Gould's "The Streak of Streaks" (a review of Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of '41 by
Michael Seidel) first appeared in The New York Review of Books, Aug. 18, 1988. The essay was reprinted in
Gould's collection Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections In Natural History (Norton, 1991).

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In Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997), American author Barbara
Ehrenreich analyzes the psychology of war and of warriors. In this passage from the opening
chapter, she explains why the ritualistic experience of boot camp is a psychological necessity
for new soldiers.

from Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War* by Barbara Ehrenreich

. . . So if there is a destructive instinct that impels men to war, it is a weak one and often requires a great deal of
help.
In seventeenth-century Europe, the transformation of man into soldier took on a new form, more
concerted and disciplined, and far less pleasant, than wine. New recruits and even seasoned veterans were
endlessly drilled, hour after hour, until each man began to feel himself part of a single, giant fighting machine.
The drill was only partially inspired by the technology of firearms. It's easy enough to teach a man to shoot a
gun; the problem is to make him willing to get into situations where guns are being shot and to remain there
long enough to do some shooting of his own. So modern military training aims at a transformation parallel to
that achieved by "primitives" with war drums and paint: In the fanatical routines of boot camp, a man leaves
behind his former identity and is reborn as a creature of the military--an automaton and also, ideally, a willing
killer of other men.
This is not to suggest that killing is foreign to human nature or, more narrowly, to the male personality.
Men (and women) have again and again proved themselves capable of killing impulsively and with gusto. But
there is a huge difference between a war and an ordinary fight. War not only departs from the normal; it inverts
all that is moral and right: In war one should kill, should steal, should burn cities and farms, should perhaps
even rape matrons and little girls. Whether or not such activities are "natural" or at some level instinctual, most
men undertake them only by entering what appears to be an "altered state"--induced by drugs or lengthy
drilling, and denoted by face paint or khakis.

* From Chapter One, "The Ecstasy of War," in Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, by
Barbara Ehrenreich, published by Henry Holt and Company in 1997.

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Carol Bly was an award-winning author of essays, short stories, and two
nonfiction works on writing. Tobias Wolff has said that her stories possess "a
tremendous moral rigor . . . even a moral ferocity."
In "Getting Tired," an essay in the book A Letter from the Country, the
Minnesota author begins by describing a John Deere 6600 combine, which leads to
reflections on the nature of modern farm work. In the following excerpt from that
essay, Bly offers an extended definition of "monkeying" from a distinctly rural point
of view.

from "Getting Tired"* by Carol Bly (1930-2007)

The value of the 66 is that it can do anything, and to change it from a combine to a cornpicker takes one
man about half an hour, whereas most machine conversions on farms take several men a half day. It frees its
owner from a lot of monkeying.
Monkeying, in city life, is what little boys do to clocks so they never run again. In farming it has two
quite different meanings. The first is small side projects. You monkey with poultry, unless you're a major egg
handler. Or you monkey with ducks or geese. If you have a very small milk herd, and finally decide that prices
plus state regulations don't make your few Holsteins worthwhile, you "quit monkeying with them." There is a
hidden dignity in this word: it precludes mention of money. It lets the wife of a very marginal farmer have a
conversation with a woman who may be helping her husband run fifteen hundred acres. "How you coming with
those geese?" "Oh, we've been real disgusted. We're thinking of quitting monkeying with them." It saves her
having to say, "We lost our shirts on those darn geese."
The other meaning of monkeying is wrestling with and maintaining machinery, such as changing heads
from combining to cornpicking. Farmers who cornpick the old way, in which the corn isn't shelled
automatically during picking in the field but must be elevated to the top of a pile by belt and then shelled, put up
with some monkeying.

* Carol Bly's "Getting Tired" originally appeared in her monthly column, "A Letter from the Country," in the
Minnesota Public Radio Magazine. It was later published in Letters from the Country (Harper & Row, 1981,
reprinted by the University of Minnesota Press in 1999).

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A highly regarded art critic, novelist, poet, essayist, and screenwriter, John
Berger began his career as a painter in London. Among his best known works are
Ways of Seeing (1972), a series of essays about the power of visual images, and G.
(also 1972), an experimental novel which was awarded both the Booker Prize and
the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
In this passage from And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984),
Berger draws on the writings of Mircea Eliade, a Romanian-born historian of
religion, to offer an extended definition of home.

The Meaning of Home* by John Berger

The term home (Old Norse Heimer, High German heim, Greek komi, meaning "village") has, since a
long time, been taken over by two kinds of moralists, both dear to those who wield power. The notion of home
became the keystone for a code of domestic morality, safeguarding the property (which included the women) of
the family. Simultaneously the notion of homeland supplied a first article of faith for patriotism, persuading
men to die in wars which often served no other interest except that of a minority of their ruling class. Both
usages have hidden the original meaning.
Originally home meant the center of the world--not in a geographical, but in an ontological sense.
Mircea Eliade has demonstrated how home was the place from which the world could be founded. A home was
established, as he says, "at the heart of the real." In traditional societies, everything that made sense of the world
was real; the surrounding chaos existed and was threatening, but it was threatening because it was unreal.
Without a home at the center of the real, one was not only shelterless, but also lost in nonbeing, in unreality.
Without a home everything was fragmentation.
Home was the center of the world because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a
horizontal one. The vertical line was a path leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld. The
horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, all the possible roads leading across the earth to other places.
Thus, at home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and to the dead of the underworld. This nearness promised
access to both. And at the same time, one was at the starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all
terrestrial journeys.

* Originally published in And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, by John Berger (Pantheon Books, 1984).

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From the 1940s to the 1980s, Sydney J. Harris wrote a daily column, titled
"Strictly Personal," that was syndicated in hundreds of newspapers throughout the
United States. Described as "America's finest living aphorist" and "the most cosmic
journalist we possess," Harris wrote thought-provoking personal essays on various
aspects of contemporary life.
In this brief essay, first published in 1961, Harris offers an extended definition
of a familiar character type.

A Jerk* by Sidney J. Harris

I don't know whether history repeats itself, but biography certainly does. The other day, Michael came in
and asked me what a "jerk" was--the same question Carolyn put to me a dozen years ago.
At that time, I fluffed her off with some inane answer, such as, "A jerk isn't a very nice person," but both
of us knew it was an unsatisfactory reply. When she went to bed, I began trying to work up a suitable definition.
It is a marvelously apt word, of course. Until it was coined, there was really no single word in English to
describe the kind of person who is a jerk--"boob" and "simp" were too old hat, and besides they really didn’t fit,
for they could be lovable, and a jerk never is.
Thinking it over, I decided that a jerk is basically a person without insight. He is not necessarily a fool or
a dope, because some extremely clever persons can be jerks. In fact, it has little to do with intelligence as we
commonly think of it; it is, rather, a kind of subtle but persuasive aroma emanating from the inner part of the
personality.
I know a college president who can be described only as a jerk. He is not an unintelligent man, nor
unlearned, nor even unschooled in the social amenities. Yet he is a jerk cum laude, because of a fatal flaw in his
nature--he is totally incapable of looking into the mirror of his soul and shuddering at what he sees there.
A jerk, then, is a man (or woman) who is utterly unable to see himself as he appears to others. He has no
grace, he is tactless without meaning to be, he is a bore even to his best friends, he is an egotist without charm.
All of us are egotists to some extent, but most of us--unlike the jerk--are perfectly and horribly aware of it when
we make asses of ourselves. The jerk never knows.

* "A Jerk" by Sydney J. Harris was published in Last Things First, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961.

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A staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1992, Susan Orlean has published several works of
nonfiction, including The Orchid (1999), The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup (2002), and My Kind of Place:
Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (2004). The paragraphs that follow have been drawn
from one of these travel stories, "Super-Duper," which originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1995.
Orlean's writing style has been variously described as "crisp [and] elegant," "snapshot-vivid," and
"disarming but disciplined." Here she introduces specific examples to support her thesis that "the real contest
at the Super Bowl" is not the game itself but the metaphorical battles leading up to it.

from "Super-Duper" by Susan Orlean

If football is a metaphor for war, then Super Bowl week is a metaphor for football. Throughout the
week, everything had a sort of battlefield urgency and martial precision. Posted at the Media Center: "Following
is a press release regarding the Super Bowl Sod. It is from Bermuda Dunes (near Palm Springs), California, not
Las Vegas. . . . It is very important for it to be known that the sod is from Palm Springs . . . and not Las Vegas,
as has previously been reported." Over the PA at an outdoor souvenir fair: "Attention, personnel! We need mini-
helmets at the autograph booth! Mini-helmets! ASAP!" At the Commissioners' Party, an enormous gala at the
Miami Beach Convention Center, the league owners were penned in a corner apart from the crowd and were
guarded by wiry tough guys with walkie talkies. One tough guy had collared a small, tan man with luminous
white hair who was headed into the pen. "Station to command base," the guard said into his walkie-talkie. "I
have a certain individual here asserting he is one of the owners of the Seattle Seahawks. Can you clear me?" He
was, and they did.
The Super Bowl is billed as the ultimate American sporting event and the ultimate athletic battle: No
other television broadcast attracts a larger audience, and the money and effort that people spend to attend it is
stupendous. But during my week in Miami, I didn't feel that it was on the brink of a singular decisive battle: I
felt that I was bouncing from one little skirmish to another--the mini-helmet crisis, the heavy-duty credentials
checkpoints at the parties, the elbowing through crowds to get near one of the players, the press briefings about
which Charger had a case of the gout and whether the 49ers practiced in full pads or just in sweatclothes. Very
few Super Bowls ever turn out to be exciting games. This is blamed, variously, on the misalignment in the two
football conferences, which means the matchup always has one clearly superior team; on the fact that you can
never guarantee that any single game in any sport will be suspenseful (as opposed to a playoff series, which
builds momentum); or on the simple fact that nothing, no matter how thrilling, could ever live up to the hype
that precedes every Super Bowl. Still, everyone runs around all week in a state of high excitation. There is a real
contest at the Super Bowl, but it's not on the field--it's a battle for tickets and hotel rooms and invitations and
autographs and access and souvenirs, and it requires both an offensive and a defensive strategy.

Originally published in The New Yorker (February 13, 1995), "Super-Duper" appears in Susan Orlean's
collection My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (Random House, 2004).

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A recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, South African novelist and
critic J.M. Coetzee has been described as a bleak writer but not a pessimistic one.
Set in apartheid-era South Africa, his novel Age of Iron is in the form of a letter
from Mrs. Curren, a retired classics lecturer dying of cancer, to her daughter in the
U.S. In this excerpt from Chapter One, Curren reflects fiercely and bitterly on the
rulers she loathes. Her metaphorical invective is artfully fragmented as she searches
for meaning in the dead language of Latin.

The Reign of the Locust from Chapter One of Age of Iron by J.M. Coetzee*

Television. Why do I watch it? The parade of politicians every evening: I have only to see the heavy,
blank faces so familiar since childhood to feel gloom and nausea. The bullies in the last row of school desks,
raw-boned, lumpish boys, grown up now and promoted to rule the land. They with their fathers and mothers,
their aunts and uncles, their brothers and sisters: a locust horde, a plague of black locusts infesting the country,
munching without cease, devouring lives. Why, in a spirit of horror and loathing, do I watch them? Why do I let
them into the house? Because the reign of the locust family is the truth of South Africa, and the truth is what
makes me sick? Legitimacy they no longer trouble to claim. Reason they have shrugged off. What absorbs them
is power and the stupor of power. Eating and talking, munching lives, belching. Slow, heavy-bellied talk. Sitting
in a circle, debating ponderously, issuing degrees like hammer blows: death, death, death. Untroubled by the
stench. Heavy eyelids, piggish eyes, shrewd with the shrewdness of generations of peasants. Plotting against
each other too: slow peasant plots that take decades to mature. The new Africans, pot-bellied, heavy-jowled
men on their stools of office: Cetshwayo, Dingane in white skins. Pressing downward: their power in their
weight. Huge bull testicles pressing down on their wives, their children, pressing the spark out of them. In their
own hearts no spark of fire left. Sluggish hearts, heavy as blood pudding.
And their message stupidly unchanging, stupidly forever the same. Their feat, after years of
etymological meditation on the word, to have raised stupidity to a virtue. To stupefy: to deprive of feeling; to
benumb, deaden; to stun with amazement. Stupor: insensibility, apathy, torpor of mind. Stupid: dulled in the
faculties, indifferent, destitute of thought or feeling. From stupere, to be stunned, astounded. A gradient from
stupid to stunned to astonished, to be turned to stone. The message: that the message never changes. A message
that turns people to stone.

* J.M. Coetzee's novel Age of Iron was first published by Random House in 1990. It is currently available in a
paperback edition published by Penguin (1998).

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"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood," says Frank McCourt at the
beginning of Angela's Ashes, "is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the
miserable Irish Catholic childhood." Narrated in the historical present tense, McCourt's
memoir provides a lyrical and painful account of growing up in Limerick, Ireland.
In the following passage from chapter three of Angela's Ashes, Frank and his
younger brother Malachy return home to find that that their parents have been forced to
move upstairs to "Italy."

from Angela's Ashes* by Frank McCourt

Two weeks before Christmas Malachy and I come home from school in a heavy rain and when we push
in the door we find the kitchen empty. The table and chairs and trunk are gone and the fire is dead in the grate.
The Pope is still there and that means we haven't moved again. Dad would never move without the Pope. The
kitchen floor is wet, little pools of water all around, and the walls are twinkling with the damp. There's a noise
upstairs and when we go up we find Dad and Mam and the missing furniture. It's nice and warm there with a
fire blazing in the grate, Mam sitting in the bed, and Dad reading The Irish Press and smoking a cigarette by the
fire. Mam tells us there was a terrible flood, that the rain came down the lane and poured in under our door.
They tried to stop it with rags but they only turned sopping wet and let the rain in. People emptying their
buckets made it worse and there was a sickening stink in the kitchen. She thinks we should stay upstairs as long
as there is rain. We'll be warm through the winter months and then we can go downstairs in the springtime if
there is any sign of dryness in the walls or the floor. Dad says it's like going away on our holidays to a warm
foreign place like Italy. That's what we'll call the upstairs from now on, Italy. Malachy says the Pope is still on
the wall downstairs and he's going to be all cold and couldn't we bring him up? but Mam says, No, he's going to
stay where he is because I don't want him on the wall glaring at me in the bed. Isn't it enough that we dragged
him all the way from Brooklyn to Belfast to Dublin to Limerick? All I want now is a little peace, ease and
comfort.

* Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt was published by Scribner in 1996. It is available in the U.K. in a
HarperPerennial paperback (2005).

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Hyperbole, circumlocution, inflated diction, and abstruse allusions are just a few of the
characteristics of S.J. Perelman's comic prose style. In these opening paragraphs from
an essay on the animate and articulate groceries in his icebox, Perelman exuberantly
illustrates Erasmus's definition of copia: "a magnificent and impressive thing, surging
along like a golden river, with thoughts and words pouring out in rich abundance."

from "I Am Not Now, Nor Have I Ever Been, a Matrix of Lean Meat" by S. J. Perelman

I awoke with a violent, shuddering start, so abruptly that I felt the sudden ache behind the eyeballs one
experiences after bolting an ice-cream soda or ascending too recklessly from the ocean floor. The house was
utterly still; except for the tumult of the creek in the pasture, swollen with melting snow, a silence as melting
snow, a silence as awesome as that of Fatehpur Sikri, the abandoned citadel of the Moguls, shrouded the farm.
Almost instantly, I was filled with an immense inquietude, an anxiety of such proportions that I quailed. The
radium dial of the alarm clock read two-thirty: the exact moment, I realized with a tremor, that I had become
involved the night before in the affair of the Boneless Veal Steaks. The Boneless Veal Steaks--it had the same
prosaic yet grisly implications as the Five Orange Pips or the Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb. Propped up
on one elbow and staring into the velvet dark, I reviewed as coherently as I could the events of the preceding
night.
I had awakened around two and, after thrashing about in my kip like a dying tautog, had lit and smoked
the cork tip of a cigarette until I was nauseated. I thereupon woke up my wife, who apparently thought she
could shirk her responsibilities by sleeping, and filed a brief resume of the disasters--financial, political, and
emotional--threatening us. When she began upbraiding me, in the altogether illogical way women do, I did not
succumb to justifiable anger but pacifically withdrew to the kitchen for a snack. As I was extricating a turkey
wing from the tangle of leftovers in the icebox (amazing how badly the average housewife organizes her realm;
no man would tolerate such inefficiency in business), my attention was drawn by a limp package labeled
"Gilbert's Frozen Boneless Veal Steaks." Stapled to the exterior was a printed appeal that had the lugubrious
intimacy of a Freudian case history, "Dear chef," it said. "I've lost my character. I used to have sinews, then I
met a butcher at Gilbert's. He robbed me of my powers of resistance by cutting out some of the things that hold
me together. I am a matrix of lean meat with my trimmings ground and worked back into me. Please be kind.
Pick me up with a pancake turner or a spatula, don't grab me by the edges with a fork. Because of all I've been
through I'm more fragile than others you've known. Please be gentle lest you tear me apart. Tillie the Tender."
The revelation that food had become articulate at long last, that henceforth I was changed from
consumer to father confessor, so unmanned me that I let go the turkey wing; with a loud "Mrkgnao" she
obviously had learned from reading Ulysses, the cat straightaway pounced on it. I must have been in a real
stupor, because I just stood there gawking at her, my brain in a turmoil. What floored me, actually, wasn't that
the veal had found a way to communicate--a more or less inevitable development, once you accepted the basic
premise of Elsie, the Borden cow--but rather its smarmy and masochistic pitch. Here, for the first time in human
experience, a supposedly inanimate object, a cutlet, had broken through the barrier and revealed itself as a
creature with feelings and desires. Did it signalize its liberation with ecstasy, cry out some exultant word of
deliverance, or even underplay it with a quiet request like "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you"? No; the whole
message reeked of self-pity, of invalidism, of humbug. It was a sniveling eunuchoid plea for special privilege, a
milepost of Pecksniffery. It was disgusting.

S.J. Perelman's "I Am Not Now, Nor Have I Ever Been, a Matrix of Lean Meat," originally published in The
New Yorker, appears in the collection The Most of S.J.Perelman (Methuen, 2001).

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Described as "equal parts incisive observer and eighth-grade class clown,"

Dave Barry wrote a nationally syndicated column for The Miami Herald from 1983 to
2005. "Thanks to my solid academic training," he once wrote, "today I can write
hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information,
which is how I got a good job in journalism."
A master of hyperbole, Barry often insists that he is "not making this up." As
you read the following excerpts from a column composed in the mid-1980s, decide for
yourself whether Barry may still be telling the truth even when he is making things up.

from "Revenge of the Pork Person"* by Dave Barry

I have never met a woman, no matter how attractive, who wasn't convinced, deep down inside, that she
was a real woofer. Men tend to be just the opposite. A man can have a belly you could house commercial
aircraft in and a grand total of eight greasy strands of hair, which he grows real long and combs across the top
of his head so that he looks, when viewed from above, like an egg in the grasp of a giant spider, plus this man
can have B.O. to the point where he interferes with radio transmissions, and he will still be convinced that, in
terms of attractiveness, he is borderline Don Johnson.
But not women. Women who look perfectly fine to other people are always seeing horrific physical
flaws in themselves. I have this friend, Janice, who looks very nice and is a highly competent professional with
a good job and a fine family, yet every now and then she will get very depressed, and do you want to know
why? Because she thinks she has puffy ankles. This worries her much more often than, for example, the arms
race. Her image of herself is that when she walks down the street, people whisper: "There she goes! The woman
with the puffy ankles!" . . .
What women think they should look like, of course, is the models in fashion advertisements. This is
pretty comical, because when we talk about fashion models, we are talking about mutated women, the results of
cruel genetic experiments performed by fashion designers so lacking in any sense of human decency that they
think nothing of putting their initials on your eyeglass lenses. These experiments have resulted in a breed of
fashion models who are 8 and sometimes 10 feet tall, yet who weigh no more than an abridged dictionary due to
the fact that they have virtually none of the bodily features we normally associate with females such as hips and
(let's come right out and say it) bosoms. The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through
street grates. If a normal human woman puts on clothing designed for these unfortunate people, she is quite
naturally going to look like Revenge of the Pork Person.

* First published in The Miami Herald, "Revenge of the Pork Person" is included in Dave Barry's Greatest Hits,
Ballantine Books, 1988.

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The narrator of Martin Amis's novel Money is John Self, a larger-than-life

filmmaker whose gargantuan appetites are matched by the author's hyperbolic
prose style. Note the effects created by tricolons and crots in these two paragraphs
from the novel.

from Money* (1984) by Martin Amis

In LA, you can’t do anything unless you drive. Now I can’t do anything unless I drink. And the drink-
drive combination, it really isn’t possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop you ashes or
pick your nose, then it's an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any
variation, and there’s a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug.
So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown
sky line carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river.
This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your
chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hours, but can you get lunch? And should you
see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF--BOOZE--NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only
way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the
time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk.
Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren’t even sure whether this is a right planet
or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.

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James Baldwin (1924-1987) was one of the major American novelists and essayists of the
mid-twentieth century. In his three major collections of nonfiction, says Phillip Lopate,
Baldwin "perfected a unique style of maximum tension which yoked together two
opposites, tenderness and ferocity." In this excerpt from the autobiographical essay
"Notes of a Native Son," Baldwin employs hypotactic structures to rank, order, and build
his observations from evidence to conclusion

from "Notes of a Native Son"* (1955) - by James Baldwin

The only white people who came to our house were welfare workers and bill collectors. It was almost
always my mother who dealt with them, for my father's temper, which was at the mercy of his pride, was never
to be trusted. It was clear that he felt their very presence in his home to be a violation: this was conveyed by his
carriage, almost ludicrously stiff, and by his voice, harsh and vindictively polite. When I was around nine or ten
I wrote a play which was directed by a young, white schoolteacher, a woman, who then took an interest in me,
and gave me books to read, and, in order to corroborate my theatrical bent, decided to take me to see what she
somewhat tactlessly referred to as "real" plays. Theater-going was forbidden in our house, but, with the really
cruel intuitiveness of a child, I suspected that the color of this woman's skin would carry the day for me. When,
at school, she suggested taking me to the theater, I did not, as I might have done if she had been a Negro, find a
way of discouraging her, but she agreed that she should pick me up at my house one evening. I then, very
cleverly, left all the rest to my mother, who suggested to my father, as I knew she would, that it would not be
very nice to let such a kind woman make the trip for nothing. Also, since it was a schoolteacher, I imagine that
my mother countered with the idea of sin with the idea of "education," which word, even with my father, carried
a kind of bitter weight.
Before the teacher came my father took me aside to ask why she was coming, what interest she could
possibly have in our house, in a boy like me. I said I didn't know but I, too, suggested that it had something to
do with education. And I understood that my father was waiting for me to say something--I didn't quite know
what; perhaps that I wanted his protection against this teacher and her "education." I said none of these things
and the teacher came and we went out. It was clear, during the brief interview in our living room, that my father
was agreeing very much against his will and that he would have refused permission if he had dared. The fact
that he did not dare caused me to despise him: I had no way knowing that he was facing in that living room a
wholly unprecedented and frightening situation.
Later, when my father had been laid off from his job, this woman became very important to us. She was
really a very sweet and generous woman and went to a great deal of trouble to be of help to us, particularly
during one awful winter. My mother called her by the highest name she knew: she said she was a "christian."
My father could scarcely disagree but during the four or five years of our relatively close association he never
trusted her and was always trying to surprise in her open, Midwestern face the genuine, cunningly hidden, and
hideous motivation. In later years, particularly when it began to be clear that this "education" of mine was going
to lead me to perdition, he became more explicit and warned me that my white friends in high school were not
really my friends and that I would see, when I was older, how white people would do anything to keep a Negro
down. Some of them could be nice, he admitted, but none of them were to be trusted and most of them were not
even nice. The best thing was to have as little to do with them as possible. I did not feel this way and I was
certain, in my innocence, that I never would.

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American novelist and essayist Harry Crews may be best known for his memoir A
Childhood: The Biography of a Place, an affectionate and sometimes painful account of
life in rural Georgia among the very poor. In this excerpt from the opening chapter of
that book, Crews recounts his earliest impressions of his stepfather, who is eventually
revealed to be a violent and dangerous drunk.

from A Childhood: The Biography of a Place* by Harry Crews

I went into the long, dim, cool hallway that ran down the center of the house. Briefly I stopped at the
bedroom where my parents slept and looked in at the neatly made bed and all the parts of the room, clean, with
everything where it was supposed to be, just the way mama always kept it. And I thought of daddy, as I so often
did because I loved him so much. If he was sitting down, I was usually in his lap. If he was standing up, I was
usually holding his hand. He always said soft funny things to me and told me stories that never had an end but
always continued when we met again.
He was tall and lean with flat high cheekbones and deep eyes and black thick hair which he combed
straight back on his head. And under the eye on his left cheek was the scarred print of a perfect set of teeth. I
knew he had taken the scar in a fight, but I never asked him about it and the teeth marks in his cheek only made
him seem more powerful and stronger and special to me.
He shaved every morning at the water shelf on the back porch with a straight razor and always smelled
of soap and whiskey. I knew mama did not like the whiskey, but to me it smelled sweet, better even than the
soap. And I could never understand why she resisted it so, complained of it so, and kept telling him over and
over again that he would kill himself and ruin everything if he continued with the whiskey. I did not understand
about killing himself and I did not understand about ruining everything, but I knew the whiskey somehow
caused the shouting and screaming and the ugly sound of breaking things in the night. The stronger the smell of
whiskey on him, the kinder and gentler he was with me and my brother.

* A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, by Harry Crews, was published in 1978 by Harper & Row. In 1995 it
was reprinted (with illustrations by Michael McCurdy) by University of Georgia Press.

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Singer, songwriter, and politician Richard S. "Kinky" Friedman is also the author
of a series of detective novels featuring a wise-cracking detective named, coincidentally,
Kinky Friedman. In these two paragraphs from Armadillos and Old Lace, Friedman
indulges in an interior monologue (that is, he talks to himself) "on the subject of loners."
Consider how contractions and slang contribute to the colloquial tone of the passage.

from Armadillos and Old Lace* by Kinky Friedman

I leaned the shotgun up against the wall, poured another cup of coffee, and lit up a cigar. I sat down in
the sunlit doorway of the trailer and sipped the coffee, smoked the cigar, and reflected upon the subject of
loners in this world. There've been some very good loners down through the ages. Henry David Thoreau, Emily
Dickinson, Johnny Appleseed, the woman who worked with gorillas in Africa whatever the hell her name was,
even Benny Hill in the last years of his life after they canceled his television show. These people all knew that
the majority is always wrong, and even if it isn't, who gives a damn anyway. They knew that within is where it's
at, and if nothing's happening within it doesn't really matter if your co-dependent wife throws a black-tie
surprise birthday party for you and hundreds of well-wishers show up who would just as soon wish you'd fallen
down a well.
I liked loners. The downside, of course, was that every serial killer who'd ever lived had also been a
loner. Well, you can't have everything. People just tend to drive you crazy after a while. That's why penthouses,
nunneries, sailboats, islands, and jail cells do such a booming business. And trailers.

* Kinky Friedman's Armadillos and Old Lace was published by Simon & Schuster in 1994.

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In these two paragraphs from her memoir Minor Characters, novelist Joyce Johnson offers a concise sketch of
life in New York's Lower East Side at the height of the Beat Movement in the 1950s. Consider how Johnson
relies on lists (or series) to organize the many cultural images and references in each paragraph.

from Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir* by Joyce Johnson

Scuffling was what you did in my new neighborhood, soon to be called the East Village. The original
poor of the Lower East Side had scuffled without hope, of course, selling their labor for low wages. Their
children grew up and fled to Queens or Jersey, leaving room in the tenements for middle-class children loosely
defined as "artists," who believed for a while, under the influence of all the new philosophy and rejecting the
values of their own parents, that they had no use for money. Nomads without rucksacks, they joyfully camped
out among the gloomy Ukrainians, the suspicious Poles, the Italian fruit vendors, the retired Jewish garment
workers dying in their fourth-floor walkups. The newcomers to the neighborhood regarded jobs the way jazz
musicians regarded gigs--brief engagements. A steady gig (really a contradiction in terms) was valued chiefly as
a means of getting unemployment insurance. The great accomplishment was to avoid actual employment for as
long as possible and by whatever means. But it was all right for women to go out and earn wages, since they
had no important creative endeavors to be distracted from. The women didn't mind, or, if they did, they never
said--not until years later.
Meanwhile rents were low, you could eat for next to nothing, toilets were in the hallway, bathtubs were
in the kitchen and you never let the meter man in if you could help it. Con Ed trucks appeared on the streets on
Friday mornings to turn delinquent payers off for the weekend, plunging them into penal darkness even if they
could have paid up that very afternoon. Yahrzeit candles, or the Puerto Rican kind with rainbow-colored wax,
were hoarded for such emergencies. Poems were written about roaches who lived in the stove, the woodwork,
the innards of portable radios and shoes, and copulated in the chocolate smelling gas heat of winter. Wives
swapped recipes for chicken-back stew or lentil soup with gizzards; tofu had not yet been discovered in the
West.

* Joyce Johnson's memoir Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir was published by Houghton-Mifflin in 1983 and
reprinted by Penguin in 1999.

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In these final two paragraphs of the essay "Pioneers: A View of Home," poet and
teacher Nikki Giovanni explores the meaning of home from a historical perspective.
After paraphrasing two lines from Robert Frost's poem "The Death of the Hired Man,"
Giovanni illustrates her points through lists (tricolons and tetracolons) and a forceful anaphora.

from "Pioneers: A View of Home"* by Nikki Giovanni

They say Home . . . is where when you go . . . they have to take you in. I rather prefer Home . . . when
you could go anywhere . . . is the place you prefer to be. I don't think of a home as a house, which is another
thing I don't own. Certainly, though, I do live in a house that I have made my home. I won't even pretend living
on the streets, sleeping in public parks, washing up at the bus or train station, eating out of garbage cans is a
valid alternative to bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens whiffing good smells every time the furnace blows. But
I also readily concede if there is no love a building will not compensate. The true joy, perhaps, of being a Black
American is that we really have no home. Europeans bought us; but the Africans sold. If we are to be human we
must forgive both . . . or neither. It has become acceptable, in the last decade or so, for intellectuals to concede
Black Americans did not come here of our own volition; yet, I submit that just as slavery took away our choice
so also did the overcrowded, disease-ridden cities of Europe; so also did religious persecution; so also did the
abject and all but unspeakable Inquisition of the Spanish; so also did starvation in Italy; so also did the black,
rotten potatoes lying in the fields of Ireland. No one came to the New World in a cruise ship. They all came
because they had to. They were poor, hungry, criminal, persecuted individuals who would rather chance
dropping off the ends of the earth than stay inert knowing both their body and spirit were slowly having the life
squeezed from them. Whether it was a European booking passage on a boat, a slave chained to a ship, a wagon
covered with sailcloth, they all headed toward the unknown with all nonessentials stripped away.
A pioneer has only two things: a deep desire to survive and an equally strong will to live. Home is not
the place where our possessions and accomplishments are deposited and displayed. It is this earth that we have
explored, the heaven we view with awe, these humans who, despite the flaws, we try to love and those who try
to love us. It is the willingness to pioneer the one trek we all can make . . . no matter what our station or location
in life . . . the existential reality that wherever there is life . . . we are at home.

* Nikki Giovanni's essay "Pioneers: A View of Home" was first published in Artemis (1988) and reprinted in
the collection Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles (William Morrow, 1988).

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In his second volume of memoirs, Ways of Escape (1980), Graham Greene observed that "Writing is a
form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape
the madness, melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation." During his long career, the
popular British author exorcised his demons in over two-dozen novels, four collections of short stories, and
several volumes of essays and travel writings.
In this brief narrative from the opening of the essay "The Lost Childhood" (published in 1947), Greene
recalls "the dangerous moment" when he first discovered that he could read.

from The Lost Childhood by Graham Greene

Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire,
we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely
a confirmation of what is in our minds already: as in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected
flatteringly back.
But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune-teller
who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future. I suppose that is why books
excited us so much. What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in
those first fourteen years? Of course I should be interested to hear that a new novel by Mr. E.M. Forster was
going to appear this spring, but I could never compare that mild expectation of civilized pleasure with the
missed heartbeat, the appalled glee I felt when I found on a library shelf a novel by Richard Haggard, Percy
Westerman, Captain Brereton or Stanley Weyman which I had not read before. It is in those early years that I
would look for the crisis, the moment when life took a new slant in its journey towards death.
I remember distinctly the suddenness with which a key turned in a lock and I found I could read--not
just the sentences in a reading book with the syllables coupled like railway carriages, but a real book. It was
paper-covered with the picture of a boy, bound and gagged, dangling at the end of a rope inside a well with the
water rising above his waist--an adventure of Dixon Brett, detective. All a long summer holiday I kept my
secret, as I believed: I did not want anybody to know that I could read. I suppose I half consciously realized
even then that this was the dangerous moment. I was safe so long as I could not read--the wheels had not begun
to turn, but now the future stood around on bookshelves everywhere waiting for the child to choose--the life of a
chartered accountant perhaps, a colonial civil servant, a planter in China, a steady job in a bank, happiness and
misery, eventually one particular form of death, for surely we choose our death much as we choose our job. It
grows out of our acts and our evasions, out of our fears and out of our moments of courage. I suppose my
mother must have discovered my secret, for on the journey home I was presented for the train with another real
book, a copy of Ballantyne's Coral Island with only a single picture to look at, a coloured frontispiece. But I
would admit nothing. All the long journey I stared at the one picture and never opened the book.

First published in 1947, the essay "The Lost Childhood" by Graham Greene appears in The Lost Childhood and
Other Essays (1951) and also Collected Essays (The Bodley Head, 1969).

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In his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), poet, historian, and civil
rights activist James Weldon Johnson offered a fictional version of his own journey from
the American South to New York City in 1901. In these opening paragraphs from
Chapter Six, the unnamed narrator recalls his first encounter with the deceptive
enchantments of Manhattan.

from The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man* by James Weldon Johnson

We steamed up into New York Harbor late one afternoon in spring. The last
efforts of the sun were being put forth in turning the waters of the bay to glistening gold; the green islands on
either side, in spite of their warlike mountings, looked calm and peaceful; the buildings of the town shone out in
a reflected light which gave the city an air of enchantment; and, truly, it is an enchanted spot. New York City is
the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her
alluring white face and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments--constantly
enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all
these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns
to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then
with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall.
Twice I had passed through it, but this was really my first visit to New York; and as I walked about that
evening, I began to feel the dread power of the city; the crowds, the lights, the excitement, the gaiety, and all its
subtler stimulating influences began to take effect upon me. My blood ran quicker and I felt that I was just
beginning to live. To some natures this stimulant of life in a great city becomes a thing as binding and necessary
as opium is to one addicted to the habit. It becomes their breath of life; they cannot exist outside of it; rather
than be deprived of it they are content to suffer hunger, want, pain, and misery; they would not exchange even a
ragged and wretched condition among the great crowd for any degree of comfort away from it.
As soon as we landed, four of us went directly to a lodging house in 27th Street, just west of Sixth
Avenue. The house was run by a short, stout mulatto man, who was exceedingly talkative and inquisitive. In
fifteen minutes he not only knew the history of the past life of each one of us, but had a clearer idea of what we
intended to do in the future than we ourselves. He sought this information so much with an air of being very
particular as to whom he admitted into his house that we tremblingly answered every question that he asked.
When we had become located we went out and got supper, then walked around until about ten o'clock. At that
hour we met a couple of young fellows who lived in New York and were known to one of the members of our
party. It was suggested we go to a certain place which was known by the proprietor's name. We turned into one
of the cross streets and mounted the stoop of a house in about the middle of a block between Sixth and Seventh
Avenues. One of the young men whom we had met rang a bell, and a man on the inside cracked the door a
couple of inches; then opened it and let us in. We found ourselves in the hallway of what had once been a
residence. The front parlor had been converted into a bar, and a half-dozen or so well-dressed men were in the
room. We went in and after a general introduction had several rounds of beer. In the back parlor a crowd was
sitting and standing around the walls of the room watching an exciting and noisy game of pool. I walked back
and joined this crowd to watch the game, and principally to get away from the drinking party. The game was
really interesting, the players being quite expert, and the excitement was heightened by the bets which were
being made on the result. At times the antics and remarks of both players and spectators were amusing. When,
at a critical point, a player missed a shot, he was deluged, by those financially interested in his making it, with a
flood of epithets synonymous with "chump"; while from the others he would be jeered by such remarks as
"Nigger, dat cue ain't no hoe-handle." I noticed that among this class of colored men the word "nigger" was
freely used in about the same sense as the word "fellow," and sometimes as a term of almost endearment; but I
soon learned that its use was positively and absolutely prohibited to white men.

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In this passage from her family memoir The View from Morningside (J. B. Lippincott, 1978), author and
educator Constance Taber Colby illustrates her thesis with a striking, double-edged narrative.

from The View from Morningside: One Family's New York by Constance Taber Colby

New York City has always been called a collection of neighborhoods. Nowadays, to be sure, some of the
neighborhoods look more like armed camps or the ruined areas where the camps once stood. But in places like
the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where my husband and I live with our two daughters, old-fashioned
neighborhoods still exist. When we first came here years ago, we realized at once that we had moved into a
community that had its own special landmarks and its own local pride. And we soon learned that the people
who live here, like neighbors everywhere, trade gossip, make their daily rounds at predictable times, and, in
general, keep an eye on things.
So when I saw Clara Morelli, retired school librarian and longtime resident of the neighborhood,
standing at the sidewalk fruit stand, weighing a grapefruit in each hand, I hurried over to say hello. It had been
some time since we last ran into each other during our weekday errands, and I'd been intending to ask the grocer
if he had any news of her.
"I've been in the hospital," she said, almost proudly. And then she told me why.
She had been coming home from eight o'clock mass one Sunday morning a few weeks earlier when she
was grabbed from behind and slammed down to the pavement. She said she held up her purse at once and
begged, "Take anything you want, only please don't hurt me. I'm 80 years old, please don't." But her two
assailants not only seized her purse and tore off her wristwatch (which had belonged to her mother) but also
began kicking her face as she writhed and wept. The street was empty of passersby at that hour on a Sunday,
and only the arrival of a cruising taxicab, which slowed immediately, saved Miss Morelli from severe injury
and possibly death. As it was, the driver had to take her to St. Luke Hospital, where she stayed for three days,
recovering from shock and concussion. "He was such a nice man," she told me. "And I didn't think to get his
name so I could thank him."
I didn't know what to say. What could anyone say except that it was awful?
"Of course, it was partly my own fault," Miss Morelli went on. "I should never have gone down a side
street in that neighborhood. It was up near St. Mary's Chapel, you know."
"Have you ever considered leaving New York?" I asked. "Couldn't you go stay with your sister in
Maine?"
Her look was one of complete astonishment.
"Whatever for?" she demanded. "Why should I move away? There's no place on earth I'd rather live than
right here in Manhattan."
But it's just not safe here!" I said.
"Safe? What's safe?" She gave the New Yorker's characteristic little shrug, palms up, head cocked to one
said. "It's not safe anywhere these days, if you ask me. No, as far as I'm concerned, I agree with what my
butcher always says. You know Bernie, down at the Morningside Market? He says, 'Safe is how lucky you are.'"
"Well, maybe you're right. But even putting aside the danger, I don't think this is really a good place to
live any more. Everything's going downhill. The city seems to be falling apart right in front of our eyes. I keep
asking myself why we stay here. Is it really worth it?"
"Is it worth it?" She lowered her voice and leaned closer as if she were going to tell me a great secret. "Is
it worth it? Well, count up your memories--that's my answer. Count up your memories."

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Bill Barich, an American writer now living in Dublin, Ireland, is the author of
several works of nonfiction, including Laughing in the Hills, a classic account of
racetrack life.
About travel writing Barich has said that "the character of any given place is
best reflected in its daily routines, so I tended to gravitate toward situations where
the most ordinary and familiar activities were going on." In "Steelhead on the
Russian," the first essay in his collection Traveling Light, Barich recounts his
experiences fishing for trout in northern California's Russian River. Here, after
seeking advice from his mentor, Paul Deeds, he describes his first effort to "play the
fish."

from Steelhead on the Russian by Bill Barich

That evening, just as the sky was turning, I stationed myself near a deep pool below a rocky outcrop and
started casting. Deed's weights were much heavier than the lures I'd been using. The one I tied to the shorter
strand of leader bounced properly on the bottom--tick, tick, tick, like seconds passing. Suddenly, the berry
stopped in transit, as if a fish had mouthed it. I lifted my rod, preparing to do battle, but I felt no resistance.
Soon enough, I reeled in a fat sucker; it flopped onto the shore like a sack of mush. Suckers are trash fish,
insults to divinity. They have chubby humanoid lips and appear to be begging for cigars. It's possible to
envision them wearing suspenders and sitting on park benches, acting like heirs to the continent's watershed. I
released mine, stifling a desire to kick it, and moved toward the center of the pool. I put my next cast under
some willows on the opposite shore. Tick, tick, tick: again the bait stopped, and again I set the hook. This time,
a steelhead shot out of the water. I played, or prayed, the fish for ten minutes, certain that I'd lose it, but my luck
held, and I was able finally to draw it into the shallows and beach it. The fish was small, about four pounds, and
male; so much milt leaked from him that a white puddle formed on the sand. I dispatched him quickly, suffused
with guilt, but the guilt changed to atavistic pride once I had threaded a willow branch through his mouth and
out of his gills and begun the uphill trek to my house. I stopped on a rise and looked back at the valley, which
was vanishing in purple haze. As Zane Grey put it, "the sunset was beautiful, resembling ships of silver clouds
with rosy sails that crossed the lilac sea of sky in the west."

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American author, journalist, and teacher John Hersey (1914-1993) is best

known today for two early works: the novel A Bell for Adano, which was awarded a
Pulitzer Prize in 1945, and Hiroshima, which traces the lives of six people who
survived the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945. Hersey published more than 25 books
over his long career and is considered one of the leading practitioners of modern
creative nonfiction.
Originally published in The New Yorker magazine, "Over the Mad River"
describes the destruction wrought by a hurricane on the small city of Winsted,
Connecticut in August 1955. Here, in a passage that might be favorably compared to
Jack London's classic account of the San Francisco earthquake and fire ("The Story of
an Eyewitness"), Hersey offers a narrative report on the flooding of Winsted.

from "Over the Mad River"* by John Hersey

It was six o'clock, and the flood had reached its crest, which it was to hold for nearly six hours. The rain
continued. Highland Lake was running over its spillways and tearing out threatening gullies right across the
macadam road on the causeway on either side of them and causing terrible damage in factories and homes
between the lake and the river below. All the way from Norfolk, the Mad River was brimming. Along Main
Street, it was fifteen feet above its normal level, and the water was ten feet deep in the street itself. It was
literally ripping up Main Street. The pavement and sidewalks were being sliced away and gutted six feet deep.
The water had broken the plate-glass windows of most of the stores along the street and had ruined their stocks.
Winsted Motors, a Buick showroom and service station that had straddled the river high up the street, had been
completely demolished, and its new and used cars were rolling all the way downtown, and its roof had lodged
itself in mid-street right in front of the Town Hall. On the second floor of the Town Hall, forty-one policemen
and Civil Defense workers and the chairlady of the Winsted Red Cross were marooned. All but two of the
town's twelve bridges had collapsed or were about to. A four-story hotel at the foot of the street, the Clifton, had
floated off its foundation and into the river and downstream three-quarters of a mile, and had settled in the town
ball field, more or less erect but with its two lower floors worn away. The water was doing damage to private
property that the town estimated at nearly twenty-eight million dollars--more than the entire grand list of
assessed taxable property, for assessments in Winsted, as generally in Connecticut, were considerably under
real values.

* "Over the Mad River" by John Hersey originally appeared in the September 17, 1955 issue of The New
Yorker magazine. A lightly revised version was published in the collection Here to Stay, Paragon House
Publishers, 1988.

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Best known for his first novel, Mrs. Bridge (1959), and an imaginatively
constructed biography of General George Custer, Son Of The Morning Star (1985), Evan
S. Connell has twice been nominated for the National Book Award and in 1987 received
the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. In a Salon.com profile
published in 2000, Greg Bottoms described Connell as "a trailblazer, a troubadour, one
of the first to put the literary scalpel to the suburban skin."
The following narrative sketch, from the final chapter of Mrs. Bridge, offers an
image of entrapment that is both frightening and absurd. (Note that this passage served
as the basis for our exercise Sentence Combining: "Mrs. Bridge.")

Hello? from Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell*

One December morning near the end of the year when snow was falling moist and heavy for miles all
around, so that the earth and the sky were indivisible, Mrs. Bridge emerged from her home and spread her
umbrella. With small cautious steps she proceeded to the garage, where she pressed the button and waited
impatiently for the door to lift. She was in a hurry to drive downtown to buy some Irish lace antimacassars that
were advertised in the newspaper, and she was planning to spend the remainder of the day browsing through the
stores because it was Harriet's day off and the house was empty--so empty.
She had backed just halfway out of the garage when the engine died. She touched the starter and listened
without concern because, despite her difficulties with the Lincoln, she had grown to feel secure in it. The
Lincoln was a number of years old and occasionally recalcitrant, but she could not bear the thought of parting
with it, and in the past had resisted this suggestion of her husband, who, mildly puzzled by her attachment to the
car, had allowed her to keep it.
Thinking she had flooded the engine, which was often true, Mrs. Bridge decided to wait a minute or so.
Presently, she tried again, and again, and then again. Deeply disappointed, she opened the door to get
out and discovered she had stopped in such a position that the car doors were prevented from opening more than
a few inches on one side by the garage partition, and on the other side by the wall. Having tried all four doors,
she began to understand that until she could attract someone's attention she was trapped. She pressed the horn,
but there was not a sound. Half inside and half outside she remained.
For a long time she sat there with her gloved hands folded in her lap, not knowing what to do. Once she
looked at herself in the mirror. Finally she took the keys from the ignition and began tapping on the window,
and she called to anyone who might be listening. "Hello? Hello out there?"
But no one answered, unless it was the falling snow.

* Mrs. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell, was first published by the Viking Press in 1959. It is currently available in a
paperback edition published by Counterpoint (2005).

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Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, is the
anonymous observer of New York City in the early 1920s. Try reading these two
paragraphs aloud so that you can hear the effects of Fitzgerald's active verbs and the
distinct rhythms of his prose.

from The Great Gatsby* by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant
flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out
romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter their lives, and no one
would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of
hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At
the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--poor young
clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for the solitary restaurant dinner-- young clerks
in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxi cabs,
bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and
voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures
inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them
well.

Originally published by Scribner's in 1925, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was republished as a Penguin Popular
Classic in 2007.

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The author of two novels and several volumes of essays, William H. Gass has
received numerous awards, including the American Book Award (for The Tunnel) and the
PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement award. Noted for his experimental use of language,
Gass has been called "the finest prose stylist in America."
In this sketch of Culp, the limerick-writer (from The Tunnel), Gass relies on
onomatopoeia and other sound effects to illustrate the character's cartoonish ability to
"whine, yelp, growl, howl, and bay with the worst of them."

from The Tunnel* (1995) – by William H. Gass

[F]rom a distance, Culp seems presentable and reasonable and normal enough. Approach, however, and
you'll hear whirs and clicks, rhymes and puns, jocularities in dialect, jingles in dirty high-schoolese, gibberish
he says is pure Sioux.
Culp's conversation is made-up like his Halloween Indian's face. It is simply streaked with zaps, wheeps,
and other illustrative noises. I guess I shouldn't say "simply" or "streaked" either. That's not exact. His speech is
not outlined or punctuated with clacks or thonks in any ordinary way. It is engulfed in them--washed with them
as though they were spit--the way street sounds surround us--surround us, you remember? during that intense
noontime tête-à-tête in a sidewalk café where I confessed my passion to an emptied cup and you lifted your chin
to look cooly away; yet that comparison is not correct either, since Culp's incessant zits, yelps, zooms, and hip
hips intervene; they serve as symbols themselves and carry on the action. If his pickup hasn't started, first we
hear last night's icy wind, and the oil in the engine thicken. The truck's doors open with a groan--which he gives
us. His trousers slither over the--ah!--cold seat and the key snicks entering its lock. The engine's frozen agonies
are minutely replayed: the starter's grind, the muffled puff of a single cylinder firing. Then the smell of a
flooded engine is delicately rendered by, as if from a distance, the bassoon. Finally: zrrBLOOM! GLOOM
ROOM AROOM!
There is palpable silence, an emptiness in the line on the page; in the corridor there is no one, or the
heart. Culp shrinks. He is shifting into another scenario. His right hand becomes a dinky little car
puckpuckpucketing along toward school.
I heard not a single pucket as I approached the crowded café. The clatter of the city collected like lint in
an unconscious corner: the corner, perhaps, the café was bent around. A comic strip.
Culp loved to reenact them, enliven their lines. He was surely brought up on Mickey Mouse and Porky
Pig. He falsettoes in fright, as they do; he zips; he squeals to a halt; he vaaroo-ooms; he tsks; he thonks. His
thonks are worthy of the Three Stooges. He does all the Popeye voices, but prefers Olive Oyl's. He has noises
for the nittles, the grawlix, the quimps, the jarns. He blows each ballon up before your ears. He reels home, +'s
on his eyes, singing the spirl that rises like heat from his head.
Don't ask him the time. He'll tell you it's dong-dong-dong-a-ding and ten ticks.

* The Tunnel by William H. Gass was originally published by Knopf in 1995 and reprinted by Dalkey Archive
Press in 1999.

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Paralepsis is a rhetorical strategy by which a speaker says (often emphatically and at great
length) what he or she claims isn't worth saying at all. In this passage from "The Tooth, the
Whole Tooth, and Nothing but the Tooth," Robert Benchley employs paralepsis for comic
effect, describing "the scene in the dentist's waiting-room" after disclaiming any intention of
doing so.

from "The Tooth, the Whole Tooth, and Nothing but the Tooth"* by Robert Benchley

Too often has the scene in the dentist's waiting-room been described for me to try to do it again here.
They are all alike. The antiseptic smell, the ominous hum from the operating-rooms, the ancient Digests, and
the silent, sullen group of waiting patients, each trying to look unconcerned and cordially disliking everyone
else in the room--all these have been sung by poets of far greater lyric powers than mine. (Not that I really think
that they are greater than mine, but that's the customary form of excuse for not writing something you haven't
got time or space to do. As a matter of fact, I think I could do it much better than it has ever been done before.)
I can only say that, as you sit looking, with unseeing eyes, through a large book entitled The War in
Pictures, you would gladly change places with the most lowly of God's creatures. It is inconceivable that there
should be anyone worse off than you, unless perhaps it is some of the poor wretches who are waiting with you.
That one over in the arm-chair, nervously tearing to shreds a copy of The Dental Review and Practical
Inlay Worker. She may have something frightful the trouble with her. She couldn't possibly look more worried.
Perhaps it is very, very painful. This thought cheers you up considerably. What cowards women are in times
like these!
And then there comes the sound of voices from the next room.
"All right, Doctor, and if it gives me any more pain shall I call you up? . . . Do you think that it will
bleed much more? . . . Saturday morning, then, at eleven. . . . Good bye, Doctor."
And a middle-aged woman emerges (all women are middle-aged when emerging from the dentist's
office) looking as if she were playing the big emotional scene in John Ferguson. A wisp of hair waves
dissolutely across her forehead between her eyes. Her face is pale, except for a slight inflammation at the
corners of her mouth, and in her eyes is that far-away look of one who has been face to face with Life. But she
is through. She should care how she looks.
The nurse appears, and looks inquiringly at each one in the room. Each one in the room evades the
nurse's glance in one last, futile attempt to fool someone and get away without seeing the dentist. But she spots
you and nods pleasantly. God, how pleasantly she nods! There ought to be a law against people being as
pleasant as that.
"The doctor will see you now," she says.

* "The Tooth, the Whole Tooth, and Nothing but the Tooth" originally appeared in Love Conquers All, by
Robert Benchley (1922).

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Though best known as a novelist (The Grapes of Wrath, 1939), John Steinbeck was also a
prolific journalist and social critic. In the essay "Paradox and Dream" (from his final
nonfiction book, America and the Americans), Steinbeck examined the paradoxical values
of his fellow citizens. His familiar paratactic style (heavy on coordination, light on
dependent clauses) is clearly illustrated here in the first three paragraphs of the essay.

from "Paradox and Dream" (1966) by John Steinbeck

One of the generalities most often noted about Americans is that we are a restless, a dissatisfied, a
searching people. We bridle and buck under failure, and we go mad with dissatisfaction in the face of success.
We spend our time searching for security, and hate it when we get it. For the most part we are an intemperate
people: we eat too much when we can, drink too much, indulge our senses too much. Even in our so-called
virtues we are intemperate: a teetotaler is not content not to drink--he must stop all the drinking in the world; a
vegetarian among us would outlaw the eating of meat. We work too hard, and many die under the strain; and
then to make up for that we play with a violence as suicidal.
The result is that we seem to be in a state of turmoil all the time, both physically and mentally. We are
able to believe that our government is weak, stupid, overbearing, dishonest, and inefficient, and at the same time
we are deeply convinced that it is the best government in the world, and we would like to impose it upon
everyone else. We speak of the American Way of Life as though it involved the ground rules for the governance
of heaven. A man hungry and unemployed through his own stupidity and that of others, a man beaten by a
brutal policeman, a woman forced into prostitution by her own laziness, high prices, availability, and despair--
all bow with reverence toward the American Way of Life, although each one would look puzzled and angry if
he were asked to define it. We scramble and scrabble up the stony path toward the pot of gold we have taken to
mean security. We trample friends, relatives, and strangers who get in the way of our achieving it, and once we
get it we shower it on psychoanalysts to try to find out why we are unhappy, and finally--if we have enough of
the gold--we contribute it back to the nation in the form of foundations and charities.
We fight our way in, and try to buy our way out. We are alert, curious, hopeful, and we take more drugs
designed to make us unaware than any other people. We are self-reliant and at the same time completely
dependent. We are aggressive, and defenseless. Americans overindulge their children; the children in turn are
overly dependent on their parents. We are complacent in our possessions, in our houses, in our education; but it
is hard to find a man or woman who does not want something better for the next generation. Americans are
remarkably kind and hospitable and open with both guests and strangers; and yet they will make a wide circle
around the man dying on the pavement. Fortunes are spent getting cats out of trees and dogs out of sewer pipes;
but a girl screaming for help in the street draws only slammed doors, closed windows, and silence.

"Paradox and Dream" first appeared in John Steinbeck's America and Americans, published by Viking in 1966.

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Novelist, story writer, and reporter Truman Capote is best known for In Cold Blood
(1965), a "nonfiction novel" about the slaughter of a Kansas farming family in 1959. In
these three paragraphs from part one of In Cold Blood, Capote offers a brief history and
description of Garden City, Kansas, site of the trials of the two murderers. Observe how
the author fre quently interrupts his sentences (with parentheses) to insert factual and
illustrative details.

from In Cold Blood* by Truman Capote

The distance between Olathe, a suburb of Kansas, and Holcomb, which might be called a suburb of
Garden City, is approximately four hundred miles.
A town of eleven thousand, Garden City began assembling its founders soon after the Civil War. An
itinerant buffalo hunter, Mr. C.J. (Buffalo) Jones, had much to do with its subsequent expansion from a
collection of huts and hitching posts into an opulent ranching center with razzle-dazzle saloons, an opera house,
and the plushiest hotel anywhere between Kansas City and Denver--in brief, a specimen of frontier fanciness
that rivaled a more famous settlement fifty miles east of it, Dodge City. Along with Buffalo Jones, who lost his
money and then his mind (the last years of his life were spent haranguing street groups against the wanton
extermination of the beasts he himself had so profitably slaughtered), the glamours of the past are today
entombed. Some souvenirs exist; a moderately colorful row of commercial buildings is known as the Buffalo
Block, and the once splendid Windsor Hotel, with its still splendid high-ceilinged saloon and its atmosphere of
spittoons and potted palms, endures amid the variety stores and supermarkets as a Main Street landmark--one
comparatively unpatronized, for the Windsor's dark, huge chambers and echoing hallways, evocative as they
are, cannot compete with the air-conditioned amenities offered at the trim little Hotel Warren, or with the Wheat
Lands Motel's individual television sets and "Heated Swimming Pool."
Anyone who has made the coast-to-coast journey across America, whether by train or by car, has
probably passed through Garden City, but it is reasonable to assume that few travelers remember the event. It
seems just another fair-sized town in the middle--almost the exact middle--of the continental United States. Not
that the inhabitants would tolerate such an opinion--perhaps rightly. Though they may overstate the case ("Look
all over the world, and you won't find friendlier people or fresher air or sweeter drinking water," and "I could go
to Denver at triple the salary, but I've got five kids, and I figure there's no better place to raise kids than right
here. Swell schools with every kind of sport. We even have a junior college," and "I came out here to practice
law. A temporary thing, I never planned to stay. But when the chance came to move, I thought, Why go? What
the hell for? Maybe it's not New York--but who wants New York? Good neighbors, people who care about each
other, that's what counts. And everything else a decent man needs--we've got that, too. Beautiful churches. A
golf course"), the newcomer to Garden City, once he has adjusted to the nightly after-eight silence of Main
Street, discovers much to support the defensive boastings of the citizenry: a well-run public library, a competent
daily newspaper, green-lawned and shady squares here and there, placid residential streets where animals and
children are safe to run free, a big, rambling park complete with a small menagerie ("See the Polar Bears!" "See
Penny the Elephant!"), and a swimming pool that consumes several acres ("World's Largest FREE Swim-
pool!"). Such accessories, and the dust and the winds and the ever-calling train whistles, add up to a "home
town" that is probably remembered with nostalgia by those who have left it, and that, for those who have
remained, provides a sense of roots and contentment.

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N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
for Fiction in 1969, tells the story of a young American Indian named Abel. In this
passage, Abel observes two eagles in flight--"an awful, holy sight, full of magic and
meaning."
Observe how Momaday uses present and past participial phrases to convey
the rapid movements of the eagles.

from House Made of Dawn* by N. Scott Momaday

Then he saw the eagles across the distance, two of them, riding low in the depths and rising diagonally
toward him. He did not know what they were at first, and he stood watching them, their far, silent flight erratic
and wild in the bright morning. They rose and swung across the skyline, veering close at last, and he knelt down
behind the rock, dumb with pleasure and excitement, holding on to them with his eyes.
They were golden eagles, a male and a female, in their mating flight. They were cavorting, spinning and
spiraling on the cold clear columns of air, and they were beautiful. They swooped and hovered, leaning on the
air, and swung close together, feinting and screaming with delight. The female was full-grown, and the span of
her broad wings was greater than any man's height. There was a fine flourish to her motion; she was
deceptively, incredibly fast, and her pivots and wheels were wide and full-blown. But her great weight was
streamlined and perfectly controlled. She carried a rattlesnake; it hung shining from her feet, limp and curving
out in the trail of her flight. Suddenly her wings and tail fanned, catching full on the wind, and for an instant she
was still, widespread and spectral in the blue, while her mate flared past and away, turning around in the
distance to look for her. Then she began to beat upward at an angle from the rim until she was small in the sky,
and she let go of the snake. It fell slowly, writhing and rolling, floating out like a bit of silver thread against the
wide backdrop of the land. She held still above, buoyed up on the cold current, her crop and hackles gleaming
like copper in the sun. The male swerved and sailed. He was younger than she and a little more than half as
large. He was quicker, tighter in his moves. He let the carrion drift by; then suddenly he gathered himself and
stooped, sliding down in a blur of motion to the strike. He hit the snake in the head, with not the slightest
deflection in his course or speed, cracking its long body like a whip. Then he rolled and swung upward in a
great pendulum arc, riding out his momentum. At the top of his glide he let go of the snake in turn, but the
female did not go for it. Instead she soared out over the plain, nearly out of sight, like a mote receding into the
haze of the far mountain. The male followed, and Abel watched them go, straining to see, saw them veer once,
dip and disappear.

* N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn was originally published in 1968 by Harper & Row. It was
last reprinted in 2010 in a Harper Perennial Modern Classics paperback edition.

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The narrator of Jonathan Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn (1999) is Lionel Essrog, an
orphan with Tourette syndrome. In the novel's opening paragraph, which follows, Essrog
describes his neurological disorder through metaphors and extended personification.

from Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown
performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I've got Tourette's. My mouth won't quit,
though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating
like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of
themselves, husks empty of breath and tone. (If I were a Dick Tracy villain, I'd have to be Mumbles.) In this
diminished form the words rush out of the cornucopia of my brain to course over the surface of the world,
tickling reality like fingers on piano keys. Caressing, nudging. They're an invisible army on a peacekeeping
mission, a peaceable horde. They mean no harm. They placate, interpret, massage. Everywhere they're
smoothing down imperfections, putting hairs in place, putting ducks in a row, replacing divots. Counting and
polishing the silver. Patting old ladies gently on the behind, eliciting a giggle. Only--here's the rub--when they
find too much perfection, when the surface is already buffed smooth, the ducks already orderly, the old ladies
complacent, then my little army rebels, breaks into the stores. Reality needs a prick here and there, the carpet
needs a flaw. My words begin plucking at threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point, a vulnerable ear.
That's when it comes, the urge to shout in the church, the nursery, the crowded movie house. It's an itch at first.
Inconsequential. But that itch is soon a torrent behind a straining dam. Noah's flood. That itch is my whole life.
Here it comes now. Cover your ears. Build an ark.
"Eat me!" I scream.

Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem, was published by Doubleday in 1999.

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A recipient of the National Book Award and two National Book Critics Circle awards,
E.L. Doctorow has published several critically acclaimed novels, including Ragtime (1975)
and The March (2005). The following passage, from Chapter Five of his autobiographical
novel World's Fair (1985), is told from the point of view of Edgar Altschuler, a boy who (like
Doctorow) grew up in the Bronx in the 1930s.
With his customary attention to precise details, Doctorow describes the small rit uals
carried out by the boy's grandmother, a "desiccated, asthmatic little woman" whose
gentleness has been consumed by senility and rage.

from World's Fair* (1985) by E.L. Doctorow

Grandma's room I regarded as a dark den of primitive rites and practices. On Friday evenings whoever
was home gathered at her door while she lit her Sabbath candles. She had two wobbly old brass candlesticks
that she kept well polished. She had brought them many years ago from the old country, which I later found out
was Russia. She covered her head with a shawl, and with my mother standing beside her to keep the house from
burning down. Grandma lit the white candles and waved her hands over the flames and then covered her eyes
with her wrinkled hands and prayed. The sight of my own grandma performing what was, after all, only a ritual
blessing seemed to me something else--her enacted submission to the errant and malign forces of life. That an
adult secretly gave way to this sentiment I found truly frightening. It confirmed my suspicion that what grown-
ups told me in my life of instruction was not the whole truth.
Grandma kept her room clean and tidy. She had a very impressive cedar hope chest covered with a lace
shawl, and on her dresser a silver hairbrush and comb. There was a plain slat-back rocking chair under a
standing lamp so she could read her prayer book, or Siddur. And on an end table beside the chair was a flat tin
box packed with a medicinal leaf that was shredded like tobacco. This was the centerpiece of her most
consistent and mysterious ritual. She removed the lid from this blue tin box and turned it on its back and used it
to burn a pinch of the leaf. She applied a match and blew on the leaf as my brother blew on punk, to get it
started. It made tiny sputtering pops and hisses as it burned. She turned her chair toward it and sat inhaling the
thin wisps of smoke--it was a treatment for her asthma. I knew it helped her breathing, and that it was scientific,
having been purchased from Rosoff's Drugstore on 174th Street. But the smell was pungent, as if from the
underworld. I didn't know, nor did any of my family seem to know, that this medicinal leaf my grandma burned
was marijuana. Even had they known, it would have held no significance, since it was readily and legally
available without prescription. But to this day the smoke of grass produces in me memories of the choking
harsh bitter rage of an exile from the shetl, a backfired life full of fume and sparks, like a Fourth of July held in
an open grave and projecting on the night a skull's leer and a clasp of crossed bones.

NOTE: The sentences in our Exercise in Identifying Adjectives have been adapted from the sentences in these
two paragraphs by E.L. Doctorow.

* From Chapter Five of World's Fair, by E.L. Doctorow (Random House, 1985). World's Fair is currently
available as a Random House Trade Paperback (2007).

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Essayist and novelist Joan Didion (born in 1934) has a habit of revealing aspects of
character (her own and others) through her descriptions of places. Consider the effects
created by polysyndeton in the opening paragraphs of her autobiographical essay
"Goodbye to All That."

from "Goodbye to All That"* (1968) by Joan Didion

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity
that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my
finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves
to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw
New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in
a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild
temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had
ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed
me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song on all the
jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went "but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me," and if it was late
enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or
later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and
even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever
happened to anyone before.
Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been
different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am
talking about myself I am talking here about New York. That first night I opened my window on the bus into
town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said
MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic,
for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in
blankets in a hotel room air-conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a bad cold and a high fever. It did
not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask
that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might
come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was. All I could do during those three
days was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New
York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the
bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

* "Goodbye to All That" appears in Joan Didion's first essay collection, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (Simon
and Schuster, 1968).

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British novelist Julie Myerson, author of the nonfiction work Home: The Story of
Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House (HarperPerennial, 2004), writes a weekly
column for the Financial Times. Here, in the concluding paragraphs to one of those
columns, Myerson relies on polysyndeton to re-create a moment that "ought to have been
. . . significant."

from "A Sad-Grand Moment That Never Came" by Julie Myerson

On the afternoon we moved out of our house, once the removal men had taken everything and all that
was left was fluff and dust and picture marks on the walls and the place was so echoey that even our own voices
didn’t really sound like ours anymore, on that afternoon my husband and I walked around those empty rooms
one last time to say goodbye.
It ought to have been a significant moment, a sad-grand moment, a moment of closure. But it wasn’t, not
really. Instead what I now most remember is glancing down out of our (already old) bedroom window and
seeing our children standing down in the street. And they were chatting and laughing and messing about, our
youngest bouncing a basketball and having to chase after it every so often, our eldest telling the middle one
something funny or rude or both, all three of them robustly oblivious to the drama of leaving.
And finally Chloë glanced up and saw me standing there and frowned. “When are we going?” she
mouthed impatiently. “Now,” I told her as I moved away from the old sash window for the last time. “Now.”

"A Sad-Grand Moment That Never Came," by Julie Myerson, was published in the "House & Home" section of
the Financial Times on January 5/6, 2008.

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A recipient of the National Book Award along with many other honors,
American author Barry Lopez is best known for his books and essays about the "rela
tionship between the physical landscape and human culture."
In this excerpt from Arctic Dreams (1986), Lopez traces the process by which
North American caribou "trek hundreds of miles each year between their winter
range near the tree line and well-defined calving grounds on the tundra." Observe
how Lopez maintains our interest through varied sentence structures as well as
precise descriptive and informative details.

Migration of the Caribou from Arctic Dreams, by Barry Lopez

Scientists are uncertain what starts caribou on their northward journey--knowledge that they have stored
enough fat to carry them through, perhaps. They endure spring blizzards on their journeys and cross ice-choked
rivers with great determination and a sure sense of bearing, but they also choose paths of least resistance over
the land, often following in each other's tracks through deep snow. Pregnant cows are normally in the lead;
mature bulls may be as much as a month behind the cows, or never arrive at the calving grounds at all. By the
end of their arduous journey the females are thin and tattered-looking. Behind them, in places where they have
had to cross rivers in a stage of breakup, there may be the carcasses of hundreds of drowned and fatally injured
animals. Their calving grounds, writes biologist George Calef, appear "bleak and inhospitable. Meltwater lies in
pools on the frozen ground, the land is often shrouded in fog, and the wind whistles unceasingly among the
stunted plants and bare rocks." The advantages of these dismal regions, however, are several. The number of
predators is low, wolves having dropped away from the herds at more suitable locations for denning to the
south. Food plants are plentiful. And these grounds either offer better protection from spring snowstorms or
experience fewer storms overall than adjacent regions.
Most calves are born within a few days of each other, and calving occurs at least a month before swarms
of emergent mosquitoes, blackflies, warble flies, and botflies embark on a harassment of the caribou that seems
merciless to a human observer. If one were to think of events that typify arctic life--the surge of energy one
feels with daily gains of ten or fifteen minutes of sunlight in the spring, or waking up one morning to find the
ocean frozen--one would also include that feeling of relief that descends over a caribou herd when a wind
comes up and puts hordes of weak-flying mosquitoes to the ground.
After calving, cows and their offspring join immature animals, barren cows, and the bulls in
"postcalving" aggregations of 75,000 or more animals, their numbers stretching from horizon to horizon. They
trek slowly south, breaking up into smaller herds. The first fall storms catch them in open country, and in the
cold, snowy air these "gray shepherds of the tundra," as the Alaskan poet John Haines calls them, "pass like
islands of smoke." They take shelter in the short timber of the taiga for the winter.
After the herds have gone, the calving grounds can seem like the most deserted places on earth, even if
you can sense strongly that the caribou will be back next year. When they do return, hardly anything will have
changed. A pile of caribou droppings may take thirty years to remineralize on the calving grounds. The carcass
of a wolf-killed caribou may lie undisturbed for three or four years. Time pools in the stillness here and then
dissipates. The country is emptied of movement.

This passage appears in Chapter Five ("Migration: The Corridors of Breath") of Arctic Dreams: Imagination
and Desire in a Northern Landscape, by Barry Lopez (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986; reprinted in a Vintage
paperback, 2001).

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Since the publication of Catch-22 in 1961, the title of Joseph Heller's first novel
has become a byword for the absurdity of war and, by extension, any senseless or
illogical circumstance. In these two paragraphs from the opening chapter, we learn
how Yossarian, a U.S. Air Force pilot in World War II, fights off boredom in a military
hospital. Consi der how the steps involved in his private "war" on language (a kind of
process analysis) introduce the novel's theme of the absurd response to an absurd
predicament.

from Catch-22* by Joseph Heller

All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients,
who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to
learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After the first
day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared
one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next
day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked
out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just
about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures
and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation "Dear Mary" from a letter, and at
the bottom he wrote, "I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army." A. T. Tappman was the
group chaplain's name.
When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters, he began attacking the names and addresses on the
envelopes, obliterating whole homes and streets, annihilating entire metropolises with careless flicks of his wrist
as though he were God. Catch-22 required that each censored letter bear the censoring officer's name. Most
letters he didn't read at all. On those he didn't read at all he wrote his own name. On those he did read he wrote,
"Washington Irving." When that grew monotonous he wrote, "Irving Washington." Censoring the envelopes
had serious repercussions, produced a ripple of anxiety on some ethereal military echelon that floated a C.I.D.
man back into the ward posing as a patient. They all knew he was a C.I.D. man because he kept inquiring about
an officer named Irving or Washington and because after his first day there he wouldn't censor letters. He found
them too monotonous.

* Joseph Heller's Catch-22 was first published by Simon & Schuster in 1961. It is currently available in a Simon
& Schuster Classic edition.

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One of America's foremost essayists and social critics, Wendell Berry is a

farmer in northeastern Kentucky and an agrarian writer in the tradition of Henry
David Thoreau and Edward Abbey. In a recent interview with Thomas P. Healy (in
Counterpunch, April 15/16, 2006), Berry described the "very serious cultural and
economic failure" of the industrial world:
We're living at the expense of basic or primary workers, primary producers.
We're living off the backs of small farmers and Central American and Mexican
migrants. And all the while we're congratulating ourselves for getting over slavery.
And that hasn't happened.
In the following excerpt from his essay "A Few Words for Motherhood," Berry
describes the process of assisting at the birth of a calf--an experience that leaves the author "feeling instructed
and awed and pleased." Berry's paratactic style, characterized by straightforward diction, is deceptively simple.

from A Few Words for Motherhood* by Wendell Berry

My wife and son and I find the heifer in a far corner of the field. In maybe two hours of labor she has
managed to give birth to one small foot. We know how it has been with her. Time and again she has lain down
and heaved at her burden, and got up and turned and smelled the ground. She is a heifer--how does she know
that something is supposed to be there?
It takes some doing even for the three of us to get her into the barn. Her orders are to be alone, and she
does all in her power to obey. But finally we shut the door behind her and get her into a stall. She isn't wild;
once she is confined it isn't even necessary to tie her. I wash in a bucket of icy water and soap my right hand
and forearm. She is quiet now. And so are we humans--worried, and excited, too, for if there is a chance for
failure here, there is also a chance for success.
I loop a bale string onto the calf's exposed foot, knot the string short around a stick which my son then
holds. I press my hand gently into the birth canal until I find the second foot and then, a little further on, a nose.
I loop a string around the second foot, fasten on another stick for a handhold. And then we pull. The heifer
stands and pulls against us for a few seconds, then gives up and goes down. We brace ourselves the best we can
into our work, pulling as the heifer pushes. Finally the head comes, and then, more easily, the rest.
We clear the calf's nose, help him to breathe, and then, because the heifer has not yet stood up, we lay
him on the bedding in front of her. And what always seems to me the miracle of it begins. She has never calved
before. If she ever saw another cow calve, she paid little attention. She has, as we humans say, no education and
no experience. And yet she recognizes the calf as her own, and knows what to do for it. Some heifers don't, but
most do, as this one does. Even before she gets up, she begins to lick it about the nose and face with loud,
vigorous swipes of her tongue. And all the while she utters a kind of moan, meant to comfort, encourage, and
reassure--or so I understand it.

* "A Few Words for Motherhood" appears in the collection The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and
Agricultural, published by North Point Press, 1982

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"The most durable thing in writing is style," said novelist Raymond Chandler, "and
style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time." These examples of
Raymond Chandler's hardboiled prose style have been drawn from the opening and closing
chapters of his 1939 novel, The Big Sleep. (Note that several of Chandler's sentences have
been adapted for our Exercise in Identifying Nouns.)
Compare and contrast Chandler's style with that of Ernest Hemingway in the excerpt
from his story "In Another Country."

from The Big Sleep* by Raymond Chandler – Opening of Chapter One

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet
rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display
handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved, and
sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was
calling on four million dollars.
The main hallway of the Sternwood Place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would
have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor
rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair.
The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling on the ropes that tied the
lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or
later have to climb up there and help him.
There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white
garage, in front of which a slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard
convertible. Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs. Beyond them a
large greenhouse with a domed roof. Then more trees and beyond everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line
of the foothills.
On the east side of the hall, a free staircase, tile-paved, rose to a gallery with a wrought-iron railing and
another piece of stained-glass romance. Large hard chairs with rounded red plush seats were backed into the
vacant spaces of the wall round about. They didn't look as if anybody had ever sat in them. In the middle of the
west wall there was a big empty fireplace with a brass screen in four hinged panels, and over the fireplace a
marble mantel with cupids at the corners. Above the mantel there was a large oil portrait, and above the portrait
two bullet-torn or moth-eaten cavalry pennants crossed in a glass frame. The portrait was a stiffly posed job of
an officer in full regimentals of about the time of the Mexican war. The officer had a neat black imperial, black
moustachios, hot hard coal-black eyes, and the general look of a man it would pay to get along with. I thought
this might be General Sternwood's grandfather. It could hardly be the General himself, even though I had heard
he was pretty far gone in years to have a couple of daughters still in the dangerous twenties.
I was still staring at the hot black eyes when a door opened far back under the stairs. It wasn't the butler
coming back. It was a girl.

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Concluding Paragraphs

I went quickly away from her down the room and out and down the tiled staircase to the front hall. I
didn't see anybody when I left. I found my hat alone this time. Outside, the bright gardens had a haunted look,
as though small wild eyes were watching me from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself had a
mysterious something in its light. I got into my car and drove off down the hill.
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a
high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and
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water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how
you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But
the old man didn't have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the
sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as gray as ashes. And in a little while
he too, like Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep.
On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any
good. All they did was make me think of Silver Wig, and I never saw her again.

NOTE: The sentences in our Exercise in Identifying Nouns were adapted from the sentences in the first three
paragraphs of The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.

* Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep was originally published by Afred A. Knopf in 1939 and republished by
Vintage in 1988.

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Dr. Paul Fussell, professor emeritus of English at the University of Pennsylvania,

is best known for his study of the literature and mythology of World War I in The Great
War and Modern Memory (1975), which received both a National Book Award and a
National Book Critics Circle Award.
In Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983), Fussell offers a
witty analysis of class distinctions in what is often described as a "classless" society. This
passage, from chapter three of the book, considers one of the more visible signs of social
class: clothing and other belongings "with messages on them you're supposed to read and
admire." Notice how Fussell introduces several specific examples as he explains why
people "feel a need to wear legible clothing."

Legible Clothing – from Class by Paul Fussell*

There are psychological reasons why proles feel a need to wear legible clothing, and they are more
touching than ridiculous. By wearing a garment reading SPORTS ILLUSTRATED or GATORADE or
LESTER LANIN, the prole associates himself with an enterprise the world judges successful, and thus, for the
moment, he achieves some importance. This is the reason why, at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway each May,
you can see grown men walking around proud to wear silly-looking caps so long as they say GOODYEAR or
VALVOLINE. Brand names today possess a totemistic power to confer distinction on those who wear them. By
donning legible clothing you fuse your private identity with external commercial success, redeeming your
insignificance and becoming, for the moment, somebody. For $27 you can send in to a post-office box in
Holiday, Florida, and get a nylon jacket in blue, white, and orange that says, on the front, UNION 76. There are
sizes for kids and ladies too. Just the thing for the picnic. And this need is not the proles' alone. Witness the T-
shirts and carryalls stamped with the logo of The New York Review of Books, which convey the point "I read
hard books," or printed with portraits of Mozart and Haydn and Beethoven, which assure the world, "I am
civilized." The gold-plated blazer buttons displaying university seals affected by the middle class likewise
identify the wearer with impressive brand names like the University of Indiana and Louisiana State.

* Source: Paul Fussell's book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System was published in 1983 by
Summit Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. It is currently available in a paperback edition published
by Touchstone (1992).

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"There are certain ways of becoming attentive," British novelist Margaret

Drabble said in a Paris Review interview in 1978. "Like walking. If I go for a long
walk, I can think better because I don't have to worry about what I'm doing."
Thirty years later in "The Missing Piece," an essay written for The Guardian
newspaper, Drabble again brought up the subject of walking--this time describing it
as one of her antidotes to depression. In the opening paragraph of the essay, she
includes references to various literary figures alongside examples from her own life.

from The Missing Piece* by Margaret Drabble

Virginia Woolf's father went in for mountaineering and public groaning, mine for gardening and a kind
of tuneless humming; he also liked to walk with his dog Anna by the river Deben in Suffolk. My mother sought
relief in pre-Prozac pills called Tofranil, and in novels. I take long walks and do jigsaws. (Reading doesn't do
the trick so well any more, although I still read obsessively.) These are all attempts to alleviate depression. We
claim we talk much more openly now about depression than we used to, and it is true that many confessional
memoirs dealing with it have been published in recent years, some good (William Styron's Darkness Visible,
Gwyneth Lewis's Sunbathing in the Rain), some bad, and some exploitative, but it's hardly a new topic.
Melancholia has been with us for centuries, and Hamlet was not the first to have suffered from it. Tennyson
feared what he called "the black blood of the Tennysons," an inheritance of mental and physical disability and
drug addiction, and exorcised his demons in the intense, hypnotic and enervating melancholia of his verse.
Some can harness it to their own purposes, and ride the waves. Sylvia Plath rode bravely and fearlessly for a
while, yet in the end went under.

* "The Missing Piece" by Margaret Drabble was published in The Guardian, April 4, 2009.

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The first two paragraphs of Ernest Hemingway's short story "In Another Country"
illustrate the author's effective use of repetition and polysyndeton. In The Art of Fiction
(Viking, 1992), David Lodge notes that "repetition on this scale would probably receive a
black mark in a school 'composition,'" but that Hemingway "breaks the rules" deliberately--
to convey a sense of experience as it was experienced, "using simple, denotative language
purged of stylistic decoration."
Hemingway's stripped-down style has often been imitated for comic effect.

from "In Another Country"* by Ernest Hemingway

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and
the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the
windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and
the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the
wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.
We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were different ways of walking across the town
through the dusk to the hospital. Two of the ways were alongside canals, but they were long. Always, though,
you crossed a bridge across a canal to enter the hospital. There was a choice of three bridges. On one of them a
woman sold roasted chestnuts. It was warm, standing in front of her charcoal fire, and the chestnuts were warm
afterward in your pocket. The hospital was very old and very beautiful, and you entered through a gate and
walked across a courtyard and out a gate on the other side. There were usually funerals starting from the
courtyard. Beyond the old hospital were the new brick pavilions, and there we met every afternoon and were all
very polite and interested in what was the matter, and sat in the machines that were to make so much difference.

* "In Another Country" first appeared in Ernest Hemingway's short-story collection Men Without Women
(Scribner, 1927). In 1998 it was reprinted in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Scribner).

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In this description of his high school English teacher, journalist Russell Baker relies on
repetition to convey an overwhelming impression of dullness and, well, primness. The
passage appears in Baker's memoir, Growing Up (1982).

Mr. Fleagle from Growing Up by Russell Baker

When our class was assigned to Mr. Fleagle for third-year English I anticipated
another grim year in that dreariest of subjects. Mr. Fleagle was notorious among City
students for dullness and inability to inspire. He was said to be stuffy, dull, and
hopelessly out of date. To me he looked to be sixty or seventy and prim to a fault. He wore primly severe
eyeglasses, his wavy hair was primly cut and primly combed. He wore prim vested suits with neckties blocked
primly against the collar buttons of his primly starched white shirts. He had a primly pointed jaw, a primly
straight nose, and a prim manner of speaking that was so correct, so gentlemanly, that he seemed a comic
antique.

Fran Lebowitz has been called "the funniest woman in America"--and also
"America's most legendarily blocked writer." Her sardonic essays from the late
1970s, now collected in The Fran Lebowitz Reader (Vintage, 1994), reflect her view
of writing as "a rarefied form of a tantrum." In the following paragraph from the
essay "Taking a Letter" (which first appeared in Metropolitan Life, 1978), Lebowitz
offers a fresh perspective on the postal workers in her neighborhood.

The Greenwich Village Postal System by Fran Lebowitz

My neighborhood is located in Greenwich Village, a quarter of the city well known for its interesting
artistic qualities. These qualities are to be found not only in its atmosphere and residents but also in its public
servants. There is, in fact, not a single local postal employee who does not possess a temperament of such lush
moodiness that one assumes that only an unfortunate lack of rhythm has kept them from careers devoted to the
composition of tragic opera. Exhaustive research soon established that this was no accident but a carefully
planned effort to bring the post office closer to those it serves. The Greenwich Village Postal System is a
separate entity dedicated to the proposition that nowhere on earth are men created more equal than downtown
on the West Side. Thus its offices exhibit a clean Bauhaus influence. The wanted posters refer to desires more
personal than federal. Uniforms are chosen on the basis of cut and fabric. And they have punched up the official
motto with the Greenwich Village Addendum so that it reads as follows: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor
gloom of night can stay these couriers from swift completion of their appointed rounds. However, offended
sensibility, painful memory, postman's block, and previous engagements may stay the courier for an indefinite
period of time. C'est la vie."

"Taking a Letter" was first published in Metropolitan Life, by Fran Lebowitz (Dutton, 1978), and reprinted in
The Fran Lebowitz Reader (Vintage, 1994).

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Born in Glasgow, Scotland and educated at Oxford University, Gilbert Highet

(1906-1978) taught Greek and Latin at Columbia University for almost 40 years. In
addition, as the host of a radio program and a reviewer for the Book of the Month Club, he
established a reputation as a skilled popularizer of intellectual topics.
In the following excerpt from his essay "Diogenes and Alexander," Highet offers a
memorable sketch of the "doggish" Greek philosopher Diogenes, who made a virtue of
extreme poverty. Highet's mix of simple, compound, and complex sentences--some short,
some long--helps to put us under the spell of a master teacher.

Diogenes* by Gilbert Highet

Lying on the bare earth, shoeless, bearded, half-naked, he looked like a beggar or a lunatic. He was one,
but not the other. He had opened his eyes with the sun at dawn, scratched, done his business like a dog at the
roadside, washed at the public fountain, begged a piece of breakfast bread and a few olives, eaten them
squatting on the ground, and washed them down with a few handfuls of water scooped from the spring. (Long
ago he had owned a rough wooden cup, but he threw it away when he saw a boy drinking out of his hollowed
hands.) Having no work to go to and no family to provide for, he was free. As the market place filled up with
shoppers and merchants and gossipers and sharpers and slaves and foreigners, he had strolled through it for an
hour or two. Everybody knew him, or knew of him. They would throw sharp questions at him and get sharper
answers. Sometimes they threw jeers, and got jibes; sometimes bits of food, and got scant thanks; sometimes a
mischievous pebble, and got a shower of stones and abuse. They were not quite sure whether he was mad or
not. He knew they were mad, all mad, each in a different way; they amused him. Now he was back at his home.
It was not a house, not even a squatter's hut. He thought everybody lived far too elaborately,
expensively, anxiously. What good is a house? No one needs privacy; natural acts are not shameful; we all do
the same things, and need not hide them. No one needs beds and chairs and such furniture: the animals live
healthy lives and sleep on the ground. All we require, since nature did not dress us properly, is one garment to
keep us warm, and some shelter from rain and wind. So he had one blanket--to dress him in the daytime and
cover him at night--and he slept in a cask. His name was Diogenes. He was the founder of the creed called
Cynicism (the word means "doggishness"); he spent much of his life in the rich, lazy, corrupt Greek city of
Corinth, mocking and satirizing its people, and occasionally converting one of them.
His home was not a barrel made of wood: too expensive. It was a storage jar made of earthenware,
something like a modern fuel tank--no doubt discarded because a break had made it useless. He was not the first
to inhabit such a thing: the refugees driven into Athens by the Spartan invasion had been forced to sleep in
casks. But he was the first who ever did so by choice, out of principle.
Diogenes was not a degenerate or a maniac. He was a philosopher who wrote plays and poems and
essays expounding his doctrine; he talked to those who cared to listen; he had pupils who admired him. But he
taught chiefly by example. All should live naturally, he said, for what is natural is normal and cannot possibly
be evil or shameful. Live without conventions, which are artificial and false; escape complexities and
superfluities and extravagances: only so can you live a free life. The rich man believes he possesses his big
house with its many rooms and its elaborate furniture, his pictures and expensive clothes, his horses and his
servants and his bank accounts. He does not. He depends on them, he worries about them, he spends most of his
life's energy looking after them; the thought of losing them makes him sick with anxiety. They possess him. He
is their slave. In order to procure a quantity of false, perishable goods he has sold the only true, lasting good, his
own independence.

* The essay "Diogenes and Alexander," by Gilbert Highet, was originally published in Horizon magazine,
spring 1963.

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The narrator of Bernard Malamud's third novel, A New Life (1961), is Sy Levin, a
troubled English teacher who abandons New York City in search of renewal at a
mythical college in the Pacific Northwest. In this paragraph from early in the novel,
Levin relates his encounter with his first class on the opening day of the fall term.
Notice the various kinds of subordination used by Malamud, in particular participial
phrases and absolutes.

from A New Life* (1961) by Bernard Malamud

Silence thickened as he talked, the attentiveness of the class surprising him, although it was a college
class--that made the difference. He had expected, to tell the truth, some boredom--the teacher pushing the tide;
but everyone's eyes were fastened on him. Heartened by this, his shame at having been late all but evaporated,
Levin, with a dozen minutes left to the hour, finally dropped grammar to say what was still on his mind:
namely, welcome to Cascadia College. He was himself a stranger in the West but that didn't matter. By some
miracle of movement and change, standing before them as their English instructor by virtue of his appointment,
Levin welcomed them from wherever they came: the Northwest states, California, and a few from beyond the
Rockies, a thrilling representation to a man who had in all his life never been west of Jersey City. If they
worked conscientiously in college, he said, they would come in time to a better understanding of who they were
and what their lives might yield, education being revelation. At this they laughed, though he wasn't sure why.
Still, if they could be so good-humored early in the morning it was all right with him. He noticed now that some
of them turned in their seats to greet old friends; two shook hands as if to say this was the place to be. Levin
grew eloquent. The men in the class--there were a few older students, veterans--listened with good-natured
interest, and the girls gazed at the instructor with rosy-faced, shy affection. In his heart he thanked him, sensing
he had created their welcome of him. They represented the America he had so often heard of, the fabulous
friendly West. So what if he spoke with flat a's and they with rocky r's? Or he was dark and nervously animated,
they blond, tending to impassive? Or if he had come from a vast metropolis of many-countried immigrants, they
from towns and small cities where anyone was much like everyone? In Levin's classroom they shared ideals of
seeking knowledge, one and indivisible. "This is the life for me," he admitted, and they broke into cheers,
whistles, loud laughter. The bell rang and the class moved noisily into the hall, some nearly convulsed. As if
inspired, Levin glanced down at his fly, and it was, as it must be, all the way open.

* Bernard Malamud's A New Life was first published in 1961 by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. A new edition,
with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2004.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard describes herself as "a poet and a
walker with a background in theology and a penchant for quirky facts." In her essay
"Mirages," from the collection Teaching a Stone to Talk (Harper, 1982), Dillard
describes the summer mirages that "mince and maul the islands and waters" in Puget
Sound in the Pacific Northwest of th e U.S.
This short passage from "Mirages" illustrates Dillard's characteristic verbal
style--a sentence style based on dynamic verbs. As Richard Lanham points out in
Analyzing Prose (Continuum, 2003), "The verb style wants to move fast."

from "Mirages"* by Annie Dillard

In winter there is nobody, nothing. If you see a human figure, or a boat on the water, you grab
binoculars.
But in summer everything fills. The day itself widens and stretches almost around the clock; these are
very high latitudes, higher than Labrador's. You want to run all night. Summer people move into the houses that
had stood empty, unseen, and unnoticed all winter. The gulls scream all day and smash cockles; by August they
are bringing the kids. Volleyball games resume on the sand flat; someone fires up the sauna; in the long dusk, at
eleven o'clock, half a dozen beach fires people the shore. The bay fills up with moored boats and the waters
beyond fill with pleasure craft, hundreds of cruisers and sailboats and speedboats. The wind dies and stays dead,
and these fierce waters, which in winter feel the strongest windstorms in the country, become suddenly like a
resort lake, some tame dammed reservoir, the plaything of any man-jack with a motor and a hull. Surely this is
mirage. The heat is on, and the light is on, and someone is pouring drinks. On the beach we dip freshly dug
clams from their shells. We play catch or sail a dinghy or holler; we have sand in our hair, calluses on our feet,
hot brown skin on our arms. This is the life of the senses, the life of pleasures. It is mirage on the half shell. It
vanishes like any fun, and the empty winds resume.

* "Mirages" by Annie Dillard appears in her essay collection Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and
Encounters (Harper & Row, 1982). A revised edition of Teaching a Stone to Talk was published by Harper
Perennial in 1988.

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Canadian-born American writer Saul Bellow was one of the most

accomplished novelists of the second half of the 20th century. He received the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1976 and the National Medal of Arts in 1988. His novel
Humboldt's Gift was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1976.
The subject of Bellow's Romanes Lecture (delivered at Oxford University in
1990), "The Distracted Public," is "the contemporary crisis" of distraction--the
"hostile condition (massive and worldwide)" that writers and other artists "are called
upon to overcome." In these two paragraphs from the end of the lecture, Bellow
explains how the writer's voice can rise above "the moronic inferno" and bring us to
attention.

from The Distracted Public*by Saul Bellow (1915-2005)

If the remission of pain is happiness, then the emergence from distraction is aesthetic bliss. I use these
terms loosely, for I am not making an argument but rather attempting to describe the pleasure that comes from
recognition or rediscovery of certain essences permanently associated with human life. These essences are
restored to our consciousness by persons who are described as artists. I shall speak here of artists who write
novels and stories, since I understand them better than poets or dramatists. When you open a novel--and I mean
of course the real thing--you enter into a state of intimacy with its writer. You hear a voice or, more
significantly, an individual tone under the words. This tone you, the reader, will identify not so much by a
name, the name of the author, as by a distinct and unique human quality. It seems to issue from the bosom, from
a place beneath the breastbone. It is more musical than verbal, and it is the characteristic signature of a person,
of a soul. Such a writer has power over distraction and fragmentation, and out of distressing unrest, even from
the edge of chaos, he can bring unity and carry us into a state of intransitive attention. People hunger for this.
The source of their hunger is found in the aforementioned essences. In our times, those essences are forced to
endure strange torments and privations. There are moments when they appear to be lost beyond recovery. But
then we hear or read something that exhumes them, even gives them a soiled, tattered resurrection. The proof of
this is quite simple, and everyone will recognize it as once. A small cue will suffice to remind us that when we
hear certain words--"all is but toys," "absent thee from felicity," "a wilderness of monkeys," "green pastures,"
"still waters," or even the single word "relume"--they revive for us moments of emotional completeness and
overflowing comprehension, they unearth buried essences. Our present experience of anarchy does not destroy
this knowledge of essences, for somehow we find ways to maintain an equilibrium between these
contradictories, and others as well.
But this is why the artist competes with other claimants to attention. He cannot compete in the athletic
sense of the word, as if his objects were to drive his rivals from the field. He will never win a clear victory.
Nothing will ever be clear; the elements are too mixed for that. The opposing powers are too great to overcome.
They are the powers of an electrified world and of a transformation of human life the outcome of which cannot
be foreseen.

* Saul Bellow delivered "The Distracted Public" as a Romanes Lecture at Oxford University on May 10, 1990.
The lecture was published in It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future, by Saul Bellow
(Viking Penguin, 1994).

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Rhetorical Terms/Devices

Figurative language is the generic term for any artful deviation from the ordinary mode of speaking or writing.
It is what makes up a writer’s style – how he or she uses language. The general thinking is that we are more
likely to be persuaded by rhetoric that is interesting, even artful, rather than mundane. When John F. Kennedy
said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” (an example of
anastrophe), it was more interesting – and more persuasive – than the simpler, “Don’t be selfish.” Indeed,
politicians and pundits use these devices to achieve their desired effect on the reader or listener nearly every
time they speak. The stylistic elements in a piece of writing work to produce a desired effect related to the
text’s (and author’s) purpose, and thus reveals the rhetorical situation.

In classical rhetoric, figures of speech are divided into two main groups:
Schemes — Deviation from the ordinary pattern or arrangement of words (transference of order).
Tropes — Deviation from the ordinary and principal meaning of a word (transference of meaning).

*Important Note: Words marked with an asterisk* are words for which it would be impossible for you to write
3 examples for your weekly vocabulary assignment. In those cases, please write only the definition, in your own
words, and the rhetorical uses/effect of that device, or do what you are instructed to do under those words.
Please mark these words that deviate from the ordinary assignment with an asterisk* when you type them on
your page.

COMMON SCHEMES — Deviation from the ordinary pattern or arrangement of words (transference of order).

Schemes of Construction — Schemes of Balance

1. Parallelism — similarity of structure in a pair or series of related words, phrases, or clauses. This basic
principle of grammar and rhetoric demands that equivalent things be set forth in coordinate grammatical
structures: nouns with nouns, prepositional phrases with prepositional phrases, adverb clauses with adverb
clauses, etc.
a. “…for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we
mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” (The Declaration of
Independence)
b. "We have seen the state of our Union in the endurance of rescuers, working past exhaustion. We've seen the
unfurling of flags, the lighting of candles, the giving of blood, the saying of prayers -- in English, Hebrew, and
Arabic." (George W. Bush, 9-20-01 Address to the Nation on Terrorism)
c. “So Janey waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time.” (Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes
Were Watching God)
d. “It will be long before our larger life interprets itself in such imagination as Hawthorne’s, such wisdom as
Emerson’s, such poetry as Longfellow’s, such prophesy as Whittier’s, such grace as Holmes’s, such humor
and humanity as Lowell’s.” (William Dean Howells)

2. Isocolon is a scheme of parallel structure that occurs when the parallel elements are similar not only in
grammatical structure but also in length (number of words or even number of syllables). This is very effective,
but a little goes a long way.
a. “His purpose was to impress the ignorant, to perplex the dubious, and to confound the scrupulous.”
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b. “An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.” (Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God)

3. Antithesis — the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas, often in parallel structure. The contrast may be in
words or in ideas or both. When used well, antithesis can be very effective, even witty.
a. “ What if I am rich, and another is poor—strong, and he is weak—intelligent, and he is benighted—
elevated, and he is depraved? Have we not one Father? Hath not one God created us?” (William Lloyd
Garrison, “No Compromise with Slavery”)
b. “Your forefathers crossed the great water and landed on this island. Their numbers were small. They found
friends and not enemies. They told us they had fled from their own country for fear of wicked men, and had
come here to enjoy their religion. They asked for a small seat. We took pity on them, granted their request;
and they sat down amongst us. We gave them corn and meat; they gave us poison in return.” (Red Jacket,
1805)
c. “Though studious, he was popular; though argumentative, he was modest; though inflexible, he was candid;
and though metaphysical, yet orthodox.” (Samuel Johnson).
d. It is the best of times, yet the worst of times: we live in unparalleled prosperity, yet have starvation; modern
science can perform miracles to save lives, yet we have war; we balance ourselves delicately on the moon,
yet destroy the delicate balance on the earth. Young people search for meaning in life, yet are confused,
demoralized, frustrated.” (Jesse E. Hobson, article from America)

Schemes of unusual or inverted word order

4. Anastrophe (an-ASS-tra-fee) — the inversion of natural word order, often with the purpose of surprising
the reader, gaining attention, or (most often) emphasizing certain words (those at the beginning and the end of
the sentence). It is most effective if the author rarely writes awkwardly, because when set among well-
structured sentences it emphasizes the inverted phrase.
a. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” (John F. Kennedy,
Inaugural speech)
b. I go, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away.” (Henry James, The Turn of the Screw)
c. “One ad does not a survey make.” (caption from an ad for Peugot automobiles)

5. Parenthesis — insertion of some verbal unit in a position that interrupts the normal syntactical flow of
the sentence, thereby sending the thought off on an important tangent that has pronounced rhetorical effect.
Often involves literal parentheses ( ), but not always; there are other ways to insert a comment into a sentence.
One might use commas, or dashes, for example. The parenthetical remark, however, is off on a tangent, cut off
from the thrust of the sentence and grammatically unrelated to the sentence.
a. “Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization—pardon me, our whole culture (an
important distinction, I’ve heard), which might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that (by
contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves: not like an arrow, but a boomerang.” (Ralph Ellison,
Invisible Man)
b. “And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched
with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one’s
friends were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there)
became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider’s thread is
blotted with rain-drops, and burdened, sags down. So she slept.”—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
c. “He said he supervised ten editors––another euphemism––in his department, which clears 90% of NBC’s
entertainment programming…” (Joan Barthel, in Life magazine, August 1969)
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d. “There is even, and it is the achievement of this book, a curious sense of happiness running through its
paragraphs.” (Norman Mailer, book review)

Schemes of Omission

6. Ellipsis - deliberate omission of a word or of words that are readily implied by the context and must be
supplied by the reader or listener. While this can make clear, economical sentences, if the understood words are
grammatically incompatible, the resulting sentence may be awkward.
a. “So singularly clear was the water that when it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom seemed
floating on the air! Yes, where it was even eighty feet deep. Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled
trout, every hand’s breadth of sand.” (Mark Twain, Roughing It)
b. “And he to England shall along with you.” (Shakespeare, Hamlet III,iii)
c. "Twenty-two years old, weak, hot, frightened, not daring to acknowledge the fact that he didn't know who or
what he was…with no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book, no comb, no pencil, no clock,
no pocket handkerchief, no rug, no bed, no can opener, no faded postcard, no soap, no key, no tobacco
pouch, no soiled underwear and nothing nothing nothing to do…he was sure of one thing only: the
unchecked monstrosity of his hands." (Toni Morrison, Sula)
7. Asyndeton ( a SIN da ton) — deliberate omission of conjunctions between a series of words, phrases, or
clauses. The effects of this device are to emphasize each clause and to produce a punctuated rhythm in the
sentence.
a. “I came, I saw, I conquered.” (Julius Caesar)
b. "Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better--splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers,
jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill temper . . .." (Charles Dickens, Bleak House)
c. “...that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to
assure the survival and the success of liberty. “ (John F. Kennedy)

8. Polysyndeton — deliberate use of many conjunctions (does not involve omission, but is grouped with
its opposite, asyndeton)). The effect of polysyndeton is to speed up or add a frenetic quality to the rhythm of
the sentence.
a. “I said, ‘Who killed him?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know who killed him but he’s dead all right,’ and it was dark
and there was water standing in the street and no lights and windows broke and boats all up in the town and
trees blown down and everything all blown and I got a skiff and went out and found my boat where I had
her inside Mango Key and she was all right only she was full of water.” (Ernest Hemingway, “After the
Storm”)
b. “On and on she went, across Piccadilly, and up Regent Street, ahead of him, her cloak, her gloves, her
shoulders combining with the fringes and the laces and the feather boas in the windows to make the spirit of
finery and whimsy which dwindled out of the shops on to the pavement, as the light of a lamp goes
wavering at night over hedges in the darkness.” (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)
c. "We lived and laughed and loved and left." (James Joyce, Finnegans Wake)

Schemes of Repetition

9. Alliteration — repetition of initial or medial consonants in two or more adjacent words. Used
sparingly, alliteration provides emphasis. Overused, it sounds silly.

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a. "Somewhere at this very moment a child is being born in America. Let it be our cause to give that child a
happy home, a healthy family, and a hopeful future." (Bill Clinton, 1992 DNC Acceptance Address)
b. “It was the meanest moment of eternity”. (Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God)
c. "Guinness is good for you." (advertisement)
d. "My style is public negotiations for parity, rather than private negotiations for position." (Jesse Jackson)

10. Assonance - the repetition of similar vowel sounds, preceded and followed by different consonants, in
the stressed syllables of adjacent words.
a. “Whales in the wake like capes and Alps/ Quaked the sick sea and snouted deep.”
(Dylan Thomas, “Ballad of the Long Legged Bait”)
b. “Refresh your zest for living.” (advertisement for French Line Ships)
c. "Strips of tinfoil winking like people." (Sylvia Plath)
d. "The gloves didn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." (Johnny Cochran, O.J.Simpson trial)

11. Anaphora — repetition of the same word or groups of words at the beginnings of successive phrases.
This device produces a strong emotional effect, especially in speech. It also establishes a marked change in
rhythm.
a. "We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas
and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our
island . . . we shall never surrender." (Winston Churchill, 1940)
b. “Why should white people be running all the stores in our community? Why should white people be
running the banks of our community? Why should the economy of our community be in the hands of the
white man? Why?” (Malcolm X)
c. "Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces
attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night, Japanese forces attacked the
Philippine Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And this morning, the Japanese attacked
Midway Island." (Franklin Roosevelt, Pearl Harbor Address)

12. Epistrophe — repetition of the same word or group of words at the ends of successive phrases. Like
anaphora, epistrophe produces a strong rhythm and emphasis.
a. “But to all of those who would be tempted by weakness, let us leave no doubt that we will be as strong as
we need to be for as long as we need to be.” (Richard Nixon, First Inaugural Address)
b. "...and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
(Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address)
c. “As long as the white man sent you to Korea, you bled. He sent you to Germany, you bled. He sent you to
the South Pacific to fight the Japanese, you bled.” (Speech by Malcolm X)
d. “In a cake, nothing tastes like real butter, nothing moistens like real butter, nothing enriches like real butter,
nothing satisfies like real butter.” (Caption from a Pillsbury ad)

13. Epanalepsis (eh-puh-nuh-LEAP-siss) — repetition of the same word or words at both beginning and
ending of a phrase, clause, or sentence. Like other schemes of repetition, epanalepsis often produces or
expresses strong emotion.
a. Blood hath bought blood, and blows have answer’d blows:/ Strength match’d with strength, and power
confronted power. (William Shakespeare, King John)
b. “Nothing is worse than doing nothing.”
c. "A minimum wage that is not a livable wage can never be a minimum wage." (Ralph Nader)

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14. Anadiplosis (an-uh-dih-PLO-sis) — repetition of the last word of one clause at the beginning of the
following clause.
a. “The crime was common, common be the pain”. (Alexander Pope, “Eloise to Abelard”
b. “Aboard my ship, excellent performance is standard. Standard performance is sub-standard. Sub-standard
performance is not permitted to exist.” (Captain Queeg, Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny)
c. "Somehow, with the benefit of little formal education, my grandparents recognized the inexorable
downward spiral of conduct outside the guardrails: If you lie, you will cheat; if you cheat, you will steal; if
you steal, you will kill." (Justice Clarence Thomas, 1993 Mercer Law School Address)
d. "They call for you: The general who became a slave; the slave who became a gladiator; the gladiator who
defied an Emperor. Striking story." (line delivered by Joaquin Phoenix, from the movie Gladiator)

15. Climax — arrangement of words, phrases, or clauses in an order of increasing importance.

a. “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance
produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has
been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to use.” (St. Paul, Romans)
b. "And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all
of you, all of you on the good earth." (Frank Borman, astronaut)
c. “Miss America was not so much interested in serving herself as she was eager to serve her family, her
community, and her nation.”

16. Antimetabole (an-tee-meh-TA-boe-lee) — repetition of words, in successive clauses, in reverse

grammatical order.
a. “One should eat to live, not live to eat.” (Moliere, L’Avare)
b. “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” (John F. Kennedy,
Inaugural Address)
c. “The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him
from his guilt.” (Martin Luther King, Jr., from a speech delivered in 1966)
d. "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence." (Carl Sagan)

17. Chiasmus (ki-AS-mus) – (the “criss-cross”) — reversal of grammatical structures in successive

phrases or clauses. Chiasmus is similar to antimetabole in that it too involves a reversal of grammatical
structures in successive phrases or clauses, but it is unlike antimetabole in that it does not involve a repetition of
words. Both chiasmus and antimetabole can be used to reinforce antithesis.
a. “Exalts his enemies, his friends destroys.” (John Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel”)
b. “It is boring to eat; to sleep is fulfilling.”

18. Polyptoton (po-lyp-TO-ton) — repetition of words derived from the same root.
a. “But in this desert country they may see the land being rendered useless by overuse.” (Joseph Wood Krutch,
The Voice of the Desert)
b. “We would like to contain the uncontainable future in a glass.” (Loren Eiseley, from an article in Harper’s,
March 1964)
c. “With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder.” (Shakespeare's Richard II 2.1.37)
d. “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” (Franklin
Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 1933)

COMMON TROPES — Deviation from the ordinary and principal meaning of a word (transference of meaning).

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19. Metaphor - implied comparison between two things of unlike nature

a. “The symbol of all our aspirations, one of the student leaders called her: the fruit of our struggle.” (John
Simpson, “Tianamen Square”)
b. “A breeze blew through the room, blue curtains in at one end and out the other…twisting them up toward
the frosted wedding-cake of a ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it….
–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
c. "With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of
brotherhood." (Martin Luther King, I Have a Dream)

20. Simile - explicit comparison between two things of unlike nature, usually using “like” or “as”
a. “The night is bleeding like a cut.” (Bono)
b. “Ah my!” said Eustacia, with a laugh which unclosed her lips so that the sun shone into her mouth as into a
tulip and lent it a similar scarlet fire.” (Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native)

21. Synecdoche (sih-NECK-duh-kee) — figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole
a. “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” (Winston Churchill, 1940)
b. “In Europe, we gave the cold shoulder to De Gaulle, and now he gives the warm hand to Mao Tse-tung.”
(Richard Nixon, 1960)
c. “Give us this day our daily bread.” (Matthew, 6:11)
22. Metonymy (me-TON-y-my) – substitution of some attributive or suggestive word for what is actually
meant.
a. The British crown has been plagued by scandal.
b. There is no word from the Pentagon on the new rumors from Afghanistan.
c. The pen is mightier than the sword.

23. Antanaclasis (AN-ta-na-CLA-sis) – repetition of a word or phrase whose meaning changes in the
second instance. These are often “puns” as well.
a. “Your argument is sound, nothing but sound.” (Benjamin Franklin)
b. “If we don’t hang together, we’ll hang separately.” (Benjamin Franklin)
c. "If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm." (Vince Lombardi)

24. Personification — investing abstractions or inanimate objects with human qualities

a. “The night comes crawling in on all fours.” (David Lowery)
b. "Once again, the heart of America is heavy. The spirit of America weeps for a tragedy that denies the very
meaning of our land." (Lyndon Baines Johnson)

25. Hyperbole — the use of exaggerated terms for the purpose of emphasis or heightened effect.
a. “It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days.” (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of
Solitude)
b. “We walked along a road in Cumberland and stooped, because the sky hung so low.” (Thomas Wolfe, Look
Homeward, Angel)

26. Litotes (LI-tuh-tees OR lie-TOE-tees) — deliberate use of understatement

a. “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her appearance for the
worse.” (Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub)
b. “It isn’t very serious. I have this tiny little tumor on the brain.” (Catcher in the Rye)
c. “For four generations we’ve been making medicines as if people’s lives depended on them.” (Ad for Eli
Lilly Drug Company
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27. Rhetorical question - asking a question, not for the purpose of eliciting an answer but to assert or
deny an answer implicitly
a. “Isn’t it interesting that this person to whom you set on your knees in your most private sessions at night and
you pray, doesn’t even look like you?” (Malcolm X)
b. “Can anyone look at our reduced standing in the world today and say, ‘Let's have four more years of this’?
(Ronald Reagan, 1980 RNC Acceptance Address)
c. "Sir, at long last, have you left no sense of decency?" (Joseph Welch, The Army-McCarthy Hearings)

*28. Irony — use of a word in such a way as to convey a meaning opposite to the literal meaning of the
word
a. “This plan means that one generation pays for another. Now that’s just dandy.” (Huey P. Long)
b. “By Spring, if God was good, all the proud privileges of trench lice, mustard gas, spattered brains,
punctured lungs, ripped guts, asphyxiation, mud and gangrene might be his.” (Thomas Wolfe, Look
Homeward Angel)
(1) verbal irony – when the words literally state the opposite of the writer’s (or speaker’s) meaning
(2) situational irony – when events turn out the opposite of what was expected; when what the
characters and readers think ought to happen is not what does happen
(3) dramatic irony – when facts or events are unknown to a character in a play or piece of fiction but
known to the reader, audience, or other characters in the work.

29. Onomatapoeia — use of words whose sound echoes the sense

a. “Snap, crackle, pop!” (Rice Krispies commercial)
b. “…From the clamor and the clangor of the bells!” (Edgar Allan Poe, “The Bells”)

30. Oxymoron — the joining of two terms which are ordinarily contradictory
a. “The unheard sounds came through, each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest,
said its piece, and waiting patiently for the other voices to speak.” --Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
b. “cruel kindness”; “visible darkness”

31. Paradox — an apparently contradictory statement that nevertheless contains a measure of truth
a. “And yet, it was a strangely satisfying experience for an invisible man to hear the silence of sound.” (Ralph
Ellison, Invisible Man)
b. “Art is a form of lying in order to tell the truth.” (Pablo Picasso)
c. “Whoever loses his life, shall find it.” (Matthew, 16:25)

Other Literary Analysis Terms useful for the AP English Language Test

*32. allegory – The device of using character and/or story elements symbolically to represent an abstraction in
addition to the literal meaning. In some allegories, for example, an author may intend the characters to
personify an abstraction like hope or freedom. The allegorical meaning usually deals with moral truth or a
generalization about human existence. Example: Orwell’s Animal Farm is an allegory on the brutality and
dishonesty of the Soviet communist system.

33. allusion – A direct or indirect reference to something which is presumably commonly known, such as an
event, book, myth, place, or work of art. Allusions can be historical, literary, religious, topical, or mythical.
There are many more possibilities, and a work may simultaneously use multiple layers of allusion. Example:
He was destined to fail; he always flew too close to the sun. (An allusion to the Greek myth Icarus.)
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34. analogy – A similarity or comparison between two different things or the relationship between them. An
analogy can explain something unfamiliar by associating it with or pointing out its similarity to something
more familiar. Analogies can also make writing more vivid, imaginative, or intellectually engaging.
Example: Getting politicians to agree is like herding cats.” (Beware the logical fallacy of the false or weak
analogy, in which the two things being compared are so dissimilar the comparison makes little sense or
becomes absurd. Example: Voting against affirmative action is like voting for slavery.)

35. antecedent – The word, phrase, or clause referred to by a pronoun. The AP language exam occasionally
asks for the antecedent of a given pronoun in a long, complex sentence or in a group of sentences. A
question from the 2001 AP test as an example follows:
“But it is the grandeur of all truth which can occupy a very high place in human interests that it
is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds; it exists eternally, by way of germ of latent
principle, in the lowest as in the highest, needing to be developed but never to be planted.”
The antecedent of “it” (bolded) is...? [answer: “all truth”]

36. aphorism – A terse statement of known authorship which expresses a general truth or a moral principle. (If
the authorship is unknown, the statement is generally considered to be a folk proverb.) An aphorism can be
a memorable summation of the author’s point. “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” ~ Vladimir
Lenin
(Note: For vocabulary assignment you may use aphorisms that are not your own work.)

37. atmosphere – The emotional nod created by the entirety of a literary work, established partly by the setting
and partly by the author’s choice of objects that are described. Even such elements as a description of the
weather can contribute to the atmosphere. Frequently atmosphere foreshadows events. Perhaps it can create
a mood.

38. caricature – A verbal description, the purpose of which is to exaggerate or distort, for comic effect or
ridicule, a person’s distinctive physical features or other characteristics.

39. clause – A grammatical unit that contains both a subject and a verb. An independent, or main, clause
expresses a complete thought and can stand alone as a sentence. A dependent, or subordinate clause, cannot
stand alone as a sentence and must be accompanied by an independent clause. The point that you want to
consider is the question of what or why the author subordinates one element, and you should also become
aware of making effective use of subordination in your own writing.

40. colloquial/colloquialism – The use of slang or informalities in speech or writing. Not generally acceptable
for formal writing, colloquialisms give a work a conversational, familiar tone. Colloquial expressions in
writing include local or regional dialects.

*41. conceit – A fanciful expression, usually in the form of an extended metaphor or surprising analogy
between seemingly dissimilar objects, usually used in poetry. A conceit displays intellectual cleverness as a
result of the unusual comparison being made, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a
summer’s day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”

*42. diction — Related to style, diction refers to the writer’s word choices, especially with regard to their
correctness, clearness, or effectiveness. For the AP exam, you should be able to describe an author’s diction (for
example, formal or informal, ornate or plain) and understand the ways in which diction can complement the

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author’s purpose. Diction, combined with syntax, figurative language, literary devices, etc., creates an author’s
style.

Denotation — The strict, literal, dictionary definition of a word, devoid of any emotion, attitude, or
color. (Example: the denotation of a knife would be a utensil used to cut)
Connotation — The non-literal, associative meaning of a word; the implied, suggested meaning.
Connotations may involve ideas, emotions, or attitudes (the connotation of a knife might be fear,
violence, anger, foreboding, etc.)

(Note: You do not have to provide examples of diction for the vocabulary assignment, but please provide
examples of words known to have a connotation different than their denotation, and explain).

*43. ethos — In writing and speaking, a persuasive appeal to the audience based on the credibility, good
character, etc., of the speaker/writer.

44. euphemism – From the Greek for “good speech,” euphemisms are a more agreeable or less offensive
substitute for a generally unpleasant word or concept. The euphemism may be used to adhere to standards of
social or political correctness or to add humor or ironic understatement. Saying “earthly remains” rather
than “corpse” is an example of euphemism.

*45. extended metaphor – A metaphor developed at great length, occurring frequently in or throughout a
work.

*46. generic conventions – This term describes traditions for each genre. These conventions help to define
each genre; for example, they differentiate an essay and journalistic writing or an autobiography and
political writing. On the AP language exam, try to distinguish the unique features of a writer’s work from
those dictated by convention for that genre.

*47. homily – This term literally means “sermon,” but more informally, it can include any serious talk, speech,
or lecture involving moral or spiritual advice. (One could say, “The President delivered a homily to the
American people last night.”)

*48. Imagery — The sensory details or figurative language used to describe, arouse emotion, or represent
abstractions. On a physical level, imagery uses terms related to the five senses: visual, auditory, tactile,
gustatory, and olfactory. On a broader and deeper level, however, one image can represent more than one
thing. For example, a rose may present visual imagery while also representing the color in a woman’s
cheeks and/or symbolizing some degree of perfection. An author may use complex imagery while
simultaneously employing other figures of speech, especially metaphor and simile. In addition, this term can
apply to the total of all the images in a work. On the AP language exam, pay attention to how an author
creates imagery and to the effect of this imagery.

*49. Inference/infer – To draw a reasonable conclusion from the information presented. When a multiple
choice question asks for an inference to be drawn from a passage, the most direct, most reasonable inference
is the safest answer choice. If an inference is implausible, it’s unlikely to be the correct answer..

*50. invective – An emotionally violent, verbal denunciation or attack using strong, abusive language. (For
example, in Henry IV, Part I, Prince Hal calls the large character of Falstaff “this sanguine coward, this
bedpresser, this horseback breaker, this huge hill of flesh.”

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*51. logos — In writing and speaking, a persuasive appeal to the audience based on logic and reason.

52. loose sentence/non-periodic sentence – A type of sentence in which the main idea (independent clause)
comes first, followed by dependent grammatical units such as phrases and clauses. If a period were placed at
the end of the independent clause, the clause would be a complete sentence. A work containing many loose
sentences often seems informal, relaxed, or conversational. Generally, loose sentences create loose style.
The opposite of a loose sentence is the periodic sentence.
Example: I arrived at the San Diego airport after a long, bumpy ride and multiple delays.
Could stop at: I arrived at the San Diego airport

*53. mood – The prevailing atmosphere or emotional aura of a work. Setting, tone, and events can affect the
mood. Mood is similar to tone and atmosphere.

*54. narrative – The telling of a story or an account of an event or series of events. In political speech, also
used to suggest the “story-line” a politician wants people to hear: “The President tried to push a narrative
that he was raising taxes to help people.”

*55. parody – A work that closely imitates the style or content of another with the specific aim of comic effect
and/or ridicule. It exploits peculiarities of an author’s expression (propensity to use too many parentheses,
certain favorite words, etc.). Well-written parody offers enlightenment about the original, but poorly written
parody offers only ineffectual imitation. Usually an audience must grasp literary allusion and understand the
work being parodied in order to fully appreciate the nuances of the newer work. Occasionally, however,
parodies take on a life of their own and don’t require knowledge of the original.

*56. pathos — In writing and speaking, a persuasive appeal to the audience based on emotion.

57. pedantic – An adjective that describes words, phrases, or general tone that is overly scholarly, academic, or
bookish (language that might be described as “show-offy”; using big words for the sake of using big words).

*58. prose – One of the major divisions of genre, prose refers to fiction and nonfiction, including all its forms.
In prose the printer determines the length of the line; in poetry, the poet determines the length of the line.

59. point of view – In literature, the perspective from which a story is told. There are two general divisions of
point of view, and many subdivisions within those.
(1) first person narrator tells the story with the first person pronoun, “I,” and is a character in the
story. This narrator can be the protagonist, a secondary character, or an observing character.
(2) third person narrator relates the events with the third person pronouns, “he,” “she,” and “it.”
There are two main subdivisions to be aware of:
a. third person omniscient, in which the narrator, with godlike knowledge, presents the
thoughts and actions of any or all characters.
b. third person limited omniscient, in which the narrator presents the feelings and thoughts
of only one character, presenting only the actions of all the remaining characters.
In addition, be aware that the term point of view carries an additional meaning. When you are asked to
analyze the author’s point of view, the appropriate point for you to address is the author’s attitude.

(Note: For vocabulary assignment, write three sentences demonstrating different points of view, and
identify the point of view).

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*60. repetition – The duplication, either exact or approximate, of any element of language, such as a sound,
word, phrase, clause, sentence, or grammatical pattern.

*61. rhetoric – From the Greek for “orator,” this term describes the principles governing the art of writing
effectively, eloquently, and persuasively.

*62. rhetorical modes – This flexible term describes the variety, the conventions, and the purposes of the major
kinds of writing. The four most common rhetorical modes (often referred to as “modes of discourse”) are as
follows:
(1) The purpose of exposition (or expository writing) is to explain and analyze information by
presenting an idea, relevant evidence, and appropriate discussion. The AP language exam essay
questions are frequently expository topics.
(2) The purpose of argumentation is to prove the validity of an idea, or point of view, by presenting
sound reasoning, discussion, and argument that thoroughly convince the reader. Persuasive
writing is a type of argumentation having an additional aim of urging some form of action.
(3) The purpose of description is to recreate, invent, or visually present a person, place, event or
action so that the reader can picture that being described. Sometimes an author engages all five
senses in description; good descriptive writing can be sensuous and picturesque. Descriptive
writing may be straightforward and objective or highly emotional and subjective.
(4) The purpose of narration is to tell a story or narrate an event or series of events. This writing
mode frequently uses the tools of descriptive writing.

63. sarcasm – From the Greek meaning “to tear flesh,” sarcasm involves bitter, caustic language that is meant
to hurt or ridicule someone or something. It may use irony as a device, but not all ironic statements are
sarcastic (that is, intended to ridicule). When well done, sarcasm can be witty and insightful; when poorly
done, it is simply cruel.

*64. satire – A work that targets human vices and follies or social institutions and conventions for reform or
ridicule. Regardless of whether or not the work aims to reform human behavior, satire is best seen as a style
of writing rather than a purpose for writing. It can be recognized by the many devices used effectively by
the satirist: irony, wit, parody, caricature, hyperbole, understatement, and sarcasm. The effects of satire are
varied, depending on the writer’s goal, but good satire, often humorous, is thought provoking and insightful
about the human condition.

*65. semantics – The branch of linguistics that studies the meaning of words, their historical and psychological
development, their connotations, and their relation to one another.

*66. style – The consideration of style has two purposes:

(1) An evaluation of the sum of the choices an author makes in blending diction, syntax, figurative
language, and other literary devices. Some authors’ styles are so idiosyncratic that we can quickly
recognize works by the same author. We can analyze and describe an author’s personal style and
make judgments on how appropriate it is to the author’s purpose. Styles can be called flowery,
explicit, succinct, rambling, bombastic, commonplace, incisive, laconic, etc.
(2) Classification of authors to a group and comparison of an author to similar authors. By means of
such classification and comparison, we can see how an author’s style reflects and helps to define a
historical period, such as the Renaissance or the Victorian period, or a literary movement, such as
the romantic, transcendental, or realist movements.

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67. subject complement – The word (with any accompanying phrases) or clause that follows a linking verb and
complements, or completes, the subject of the sentence by either (1) renaming it (the predicate nominative)
or (2) describing it (the predicate adjective). These are defined below:
(1) the predicate nominative – a noun, group of nouns, or noun clause that renames the subject. It,
like the predicate adjective, follows a linking verb and is located in the predicate of the sentence.
Example: Julia Roberts is a movie star.
movie star = predicate nominative, as it renames the subject, Julia Roberts
(2) the predicate adjective -- an adjective, a group of adjectives, or adjective clause that follows a
linking verb. It is in the predicate of the sentence, and modifies, or describes, the subject.
Example: Warren remained optimistic.
optimistic = predicate adjective, as it modifies the subject, Warren.

68. subordinate clause – Like all clauses, this word group contains both a subject and a verb (plus any
accompanying phrases or modifiers), but unlike the independent clause, the subordinate clause cannot stand
alone; it does not express a complete thought. Also called a dependent clause, the subordinate clause
depends on a main clause (or independent clause) to complete its meaning. Easily recognized key words and
phrases usually begin these clauses. For example: although, because, unless, if, even though, since, as soon
as, while, who, when, where, how and that.
Example: Yellowstone is a national park in the West that is known for its geysers.
italicized phrase = subordinate clause

69. syllogism – From the Greek for “reckoning together,” a syllogism (or syllogistic reasoning or syllogistic
logic) is a deductive system of formal logic that presents two premises (the first one called “major” and the
second called “minor”) that inevitably lead to a sound conclusion. A frequently cited example proceeds as
follows:
major premise: All men are mortal.
minor premise: Socrates is a man.
conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is a mortal.
A syllogism’s conclusion is valid only if each of the two premises is valid. Syllogisms may also present the
specific idea first (“Socrates”) and the general second (“all men”).

*70. symbol/symbolism – Generally, anything that represents itself and stands for something else. Usually a
symbol is something concrete -- such as an object, action, character, or scene – that represents something
more abstract. However, symbols and symbolism can be much more complex. One system classifies
symbols into three categories:
(1) natural symbols are objects and occurrences from nature to symbolize ideas commonly
associated with them (dawn symbolizing hope or a new beginning, a rose symbolizing love, a
tree symbolizing knowledge).
(2) conventional symbols are those that have been invested with meaning by a group (religious
symbols such as a cross or Star of David; national symbols, such as a flag or an eagle; or group
symbols, such as a skull and crossbones for pirates or the scale of justice for lawyers).
(3) literary symbols are sometimes also conventional in the sense that they are found in a variety of
works and are more generally recognized. However, a work’s symbols may be more
complicated.
On the AP exam, try to determine what abstraction an object is a symbol for and to what extent it is successful
in representing that abstraction.

71. syntax – The way an author chooses to join words into phrases, clauses, and sentences. Syntax is similar to
diction, but you can differentiate them by thinking of syntax as groups of words, while diction refers to the
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individual words. In the multiple-choice section of the AP exam, expect to be asked some questions about
how an author manipulates syntax. In the essay section, you will need to analyze how syntax produces
effects.

(Note: For vocabulary assignment, write three sentences using different syntax for effect, and explain the
effect).

*72. theme – The central idea or message of a work, the insight it offers into life. Usually theme is unstated in
fictional works, but in nonfiction, the theme may be directly state, especially in expository or argumentative
writing.

*73. thesis – In expository writing, the thesis statement is the sentence or group of sentences that directly
expresses the author’s opinion, purpose, meaning, or position. Expository writing is usually judged by
analyzing how accurately, effectively, and thoroughly a writer has proven the thesis.

*74. tone – Similar to mood, tone describes the author’s attitude toward his material, the audience, or both.
Tone is easier to determine in spoken language than in written language. Considering how a work would
sound if it were read aloud can help in identifying an author’s tone. Some words describing tone are playful,
serious, businesslike, sarcastic, humorous, formal, ornate, sardonic, somber, etc.

75. transition – A word or phrase that links different ideas. Used especially, although not exclusively, in
expository and argumentative writing, transitions effectively signal a shift from one idea to another. A few
commonly used transitional words or phrases are furthermore, consequently, nevertheless, for example, in
addition, likewise, similarly, on the contrary, etc. More sophisticated writers use more subtle means of
transition.

*76. understatement – The ironic minimalizing of fact, understatement presents something as less significant
than it is. The effect can frequently be humorous and emphatic. Understatement is the opposite of
hyperbole. Example: Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub: “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will
hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.”

*77. wit -- On modern usage, intellectually amusing language that surprises and delights. A witty statement is
humorous, while suggesting the speaker’s verbal power in creating ingenious and perceptive remarks. Wit
usually uses terse language that makes a pointed statement. Historically, wit originally meant basic
understanding. Its meaning evolved to include speed of understanding, and finally, it grew to mean quick
perception including creative fancy and a quick tongue to articulate an answer that demanded the same
quick perception.

Adapted and excerpted from Edward P. J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors’ Classical Rhetoric for the Modern
Student. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 0195115422.

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Tone Vocabulary

Like the tone of a speaker’s voice, the tone of a work of literature expresses the writer’s feelings. To determine the tone
of a passage, ask yourself the following questions:
1. What is the subject of the passage? Who is its intended audience?
2. What are the most important words in the passage? What connotations do these words have?
3. What feelings are generated by the images of the passage?
4. Are there any hints that the speaker or narrator does not really mean everything he or she says? If any jokes are made,
are they lighthearted or bitter?
5. If the narrator were speaking aloud, what would the tone of his or her voice be?

Positive Tone/Attitude Words

Amiable Consoling Friendly Playful
Amused Content Happy Pleasant
Appreciative Dreamy Hopeful Proud
Authoritative Ecstatic Impassioned Relaxed
Benevolent Elated Jovial Reverent
Brave Elevated Joyful Romantic
Calm Encouraging Jubilant Soothing
Cheerful Energetic Lighthearted Surprised
Cheery Enthusiastic Loving Sweet
Compassionate Excited Optimistic Sympathetic
Complimentary Exuberant Passionate Vibrant
Confident Fanciful Peaceful Whimsical

Negative Tone/Attitude Words

Accusing Choleric Furious Quarrelsome
Aggravated Coarse Harsh Shameful
Agitated Cold Haughty Smooth
Angry Condemnatory Hateful Snooty
Apathetic Condescending Hurtful Superficial
Arrogant Contradictory Indignant Surly
Artificial Critical Inflammatory Testy
Audacious Desperate Insulting Threatening
Belligerent Disappointed Irritated Tired
Bitter Disgruntled Manipulative Uninterested
Boring Disgusted Obnoxious Wrathful
Brash Disinterested Outraged
Childish Facetious Passive

Humor-Irony-Sarcasm Tone/Attitude Words

Amused Droll Mock-heroic Sardonic
Bantering Facetious Mocking Satiric
Bitter Flippant Mock-serious Scornful
Caustic Giddy Patronizing Sharp
Comical Humorous Pompous Silly
Condescending Insolent Quizzical Taunting
Contemptuous Ironic Ribald Teasing
Critical Irreverent Ridiculing Whimsical
Cynical Joking Sad Wry
Disdainful Malicious Sarcastic

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Tone Vocabulary (contd.)

Sorrow-Fear-Worry Tone/Attitude Words

Aggravated Embarrassed Morose Resigned
Agitated Fearful Mournful Sad
Anxious Foreboding Nervous Serious
Apologetic Gloomy Numb Sober
Apprehensive Grave Ominous Solemn
Concerned Hollow Paranoid Somber
Confused Hopeless Pessimistic Staid
Dejected Horrific Pitiful Upset
Depressed Horror Poignant
Despairing Melancholy Regretful
Disturbed Miserable Remorseful

Neutral Tone/Attitude Words

Admonitory Dramatic Intimae Questioning
Allusive Earnest Judgmental Reflective
Apathetic Expectant Learned Reminiscent
Authoritative Factual Loud Resigned
Baffled Fervent Lyrical Restrained
Callous Formal Matter-of-fact Seductive
Candid Forthright Meditative Sentimental
Ceremonial Frivolous Nostalgic Serious
Clinical Haughty Objective Shocking
Consoling Histrionic Obsequious Sincere
Contemplative Humble Patriotic Unemotional
Conventional Incredulous Persuasive Urgent
Detached Informative Pleading Vexed
Didactic Inquisitive Pretentious Wistful
Disbelieving Instructive Provocative Zealous

Language Words-Used to describe the force or quality of the entire piece

Like word choice, the language of a passage has control over tone. Consider language to be the entire body of words used
in a text, not simply isolated bits of diction, imagery, or detail. For example, an invitation to a graduation might use formal
language, whereas a biology text would use scientific and clinical language.
Different from tone, these words describe the force or quality of the diction, images, and details AS A WHOLE. These
words qualify how the work is written.

Artificial Exact Literal Pretentious

Bombastic Figurative Moralistic Provincial
Colloquial Formal Obscure Scholarly
Concrete Grotesque Obtuse Sensuous
Connotative Homespun Ordinary Simple
Cultured Idiomatic Pedantic Slang
Detached Informal Picturesque Symbolic
Emotional Insipid Plain Trite
Esoteric Jargon Poetic Vulgar
Euphemistic Learned Precise

Source: PAP/AP English Handbook, Grades 9-12

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AP Caliber Verbs
(to use in essays)

Practice using a variety of verbs to phrase “said” and “symbolize” in different ways. Avoid using “symbolize” because students find it
too easy to write “x symbolizes y” and then neglect to explain or justify with details.

show (1 x only) epitomize illustrate demonstrate

symbolize (1 x only) suggest imply infer
relay portray relate represent
signify allude reveal discover
develop describe reflect use
characterize involves diminish draw
evoke view enable transmit
introduce convey establish magnify
detail portend foreshadow reiterate
minimize maximize identify correlate
parallels corroborate refer strengthen
weaken display amplify exemplify
promote produces concludes consider
writes continues points stem
contributes cause affects effect (verb)
testifies verifies certifies vouch
affirms deters presents marks
entails explains traces leads
directs compare contrast confuse
support legitimize deny defy
define enforces enhance reinforce
adds detract resembles contradict
validates invalidates hint create
dismiss justify translate indicates
proposes mislead guide address
reaffirms states specify complement
render comprehend link communicate
paint builds balances ascertain
tint understand envelops evolves
simplify complicate juxtapose combines
connect expresses parodies satirize

WORDS TO DESCRIBE SYNTAX

plain esoteric elegant

spare journalistic staccato
austere terse abrupt
unadorned laconic solid
ornate harsh thudding
elaborate grating sprawling
flowery mellifluous disorganized
jumbled musical dry
chaotic lilting deceptively simple
obfuscating lyrical
erudite whimsical

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 Works Cited

Nordquist, Richard. "A Scrapbook of Styles: Passages for Rhetorical Analysis." About.com

Grammar & Composition. About.com, n.d. Web. 16 July 2013.