CHAPTER 4
Examples/
Exemplification
1. “An example is a specific instance or
fact that is used to support an idea or a
general statement.” “Writers frequently
use examples to explain or illustrate a
main idea” (73).
2. “Examples in an essay can both
illustrate and support the thesis” . . . by
providing “evidence in the form of actual
situations that illustrate the thesis,” thus
helping “convince the reader that the
thesis is valid” (74).
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Sentence Structures:
1. To take an example/instance from English,
the word “inconceivable” is written as one
word but consists of three morphemes.
2. Institutions such as schools play a
significant role in the establishment of
young people’s cultural identity.
3. People with tooth decay should avoid sweet
foods, e.g. (exempli gratia) cake, chocolate,
and ice cream.
4. This theory can be best illustrated by the
fact that proficient learners build up an
extensive vocabulary by constant reading.
5. The current event shows (exemplifies,
illustrates) this concept.
6. The following example will serve to
clarify the negative effects on children
watching TV.
7. Senior officers—i. e., anyone with the rank
of colonel or above—get their own
administrative staff. (id est = that is to say)
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1.
2.
3.
4.
The most common types of supporting the
thesis
Brief Examples: relating brief examples drawn
from one’s own personal experiences or direct
observations.
Extended Examples: longer, more detailed
narratives of events that have involved you or
people you know.
Statistics: If statistics are used fairly and
correctly and are drawn from reliable resources,
they are the most credible and effective type of
support.
Expert Opinion or Testimony: information
from or statements by authorities on the
subject about which you are writing.
(A) People, at least the ones in my town, seem to
have become ruder as the population has
increased. Yesterday, several drivers came up
behind me gestured rudely even though I was
driving 10 miles per hour over the speed limit. The
other day, as my friend and I were sitting on the
seawall, watching the sunset listening to the ocean
waves, a rollerblader with a boom box going full
blast sat down next to us. When we politely asked
him to turn off his radio, he cursed at us and skated
off. Every day, I see perfectly healthy people
parking in spaces reserved for the handicapped,
smokers lighting up in no-smoking areas and
refusing to leave when asked, and people shoving
their way into lines at movie theaters and grocery
stores.
(B) The senseless, brutal violence that we read about
in the newspapers every day seems very distant from
the average person, but it is really not far away at all. In
fact, it can strike any one of us without any warning—
just as it struck my uncle Silas last week. After having
dinner with his wife and children, Silas had driven to the
gas station at the corner of the First St. and Fifth St.,
where he was working part-time to earn extra money.
Some time around 11:00 p.m., two men carrying a rifle
and a shotgun approached him and demanded money.
Uncle Silas was a good, brave man, but he was a
realistic person. He knew when to cooperate, and that’s
just what he did. He opened the cash register and the
safe, then handed the intruders the keys to his new
truck. Suddenly, they shot him in the head and ran away.
(C) Parents must strive to find alternative
to the physical punishment of children.
Almost every effect of punishment is
negative. Dr. Thomas Price, famous
psychologist and professor at Stanford
University, writes “Punishment is a
traumatic experience not only in itself but
also because it disappoints the child’s wish
to believe in the benevolence of the parent,
on which his sense of security rests.”
(D) In fact, according to a study by the American
Psychological Association, the average American child
will view 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of
violence before finishing elementary school. The
average 27 hours a week kids spend watching TV—
much of it violent—makes them more prone to
aggressive and violent behaviors as adolescents and
adults. TV executives have known this for a long time.
One of the most comprehensive studies of the impact
of violent TV was commissioned by CBS back in 1978.
it found that teenage boys who have watched more
hours of violent TV than average before adolescence
were committing such violent crimes as rape and
assault as a rate 49 percent higher than boys who
watched fewer than average hours of violent TV.
“The Social Meaning of T-Shirts”
Diana Crane
1. co-opted (第2段第6行): to assimilate, take, or
win over into a larger or established group
2. cachet (第2段第8行): a sign or expression of
approval
3. grass-root (第2段第12行): of, pertaining to, or
involving the common people, esp. as
contrasted with or separable from an elite
4. bootlegged (第2段第12行): something, made,
reproduced, or sold illegally or without
authorization
5. dreadlock (第2段第16行): heavy matted coils of
hair
6. affirmation (88頁第4行): the assertion that
something exists or is true
7. batter (88頁第6行): to beat persistently or hard;
pound repeatedly
8. venue (88頁第7行): the scene or locale of any
action or event
9. sentiment (88頁第10行): an attitude toward
something; regard; opinion
10. denigration (88頁第10行): to attack the
character or reputation of; speak ill of; defame
11. confiscate (88頁倒數第2行): to seize (private
property) for the public treasury
Answer to Questions About the Reading
1. The use of T-shirts to communicate information
began in the late 1940s (with faces and political
slogans) and in the 1960s with commercial logos
and other designs) (第1段)
2. Plastic inks, plastic transfers, and spray paint
increase the use of T-shirts to communicate.
(第1段)
3. The use of T-shirts to communicate differs from
the use of the hat (which signaled social class
status) by communicating “issues related to
ideology, difference, and myth: politics, race,
gender, and leisure.” (第2段第4行)
4. The Bart Simpson T-shirt appeared to affirm
African Americans as an ethnic group and to
comment on “the narrow range of roles for
black characters” on The Simpsons. (88頁第
4行)
5. He was “arrested and interrogated, and the
T-shirts were confiscated and destroyed”
because the T-shirts were considered
politically threatening. (88頁倒數第2行)
Answer to Questions About the Writer’s
Strategies
1. The main idea: Implied. T-shirts are a
means of “social and political expression.”
(第3段第1行)
2.
a. The Bart Simpson T-shirts
b. T-shirts that advertise products, support
social and political commitment and
causes, denigrate others, and express
cynicism.
3. Each example is meant to communicate the
wide range of issues or causes that T-shirts
communicate.
4. a. The 2nd paragraph could be made into
more than one paragraph.
b. The new paragraph starts from (87頁倒數
第6行)“Occasionally, the T-shirt . . . for
black characters on the show.” and (88頁
第4行) “Victims of gender-related . . .
Global advertising.”
c. The NEW topic sentence:
2nd: “Occasionally, the T-shirt becomes a
medium for grass-root resistance.”
3rd: “Other T-shirts make statements
about gender-related experiences,
hostilities, or cultural cynicism.”

Kathryn VanSpanckeren is Professor of English at the
University of Tampa, where she teaches American
Literature, women's literature, and poetry writing. Her
published works include Margaret Atwood: Vision and
Forms (1988) and John Gardner: The Critical
Perspective (1982), as well as numerous articles and
poems.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Gertrude Stain
Ezra Pound
William Faulkner
T. S. Eliot
John Steinbeck
Karl Marx
Sigmund Freud

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the most influential
novelists and short-story writers of the 20th century. He is
viewed as the spokesman for the Jazz Age, America's
decade of prosperity, excess, and abandon, which began
soon after the end of W. W. I and concluded with the 1929
stock market crash. Thus, in his novels and stories,
Fitzgerald examined an entire generation's search for the
elusive American dream of wealth and happiness. Most of
his stories were derived from his own experiences and
portray the consequences of his generation's adherence
to false values. The glamour and insouciance of many of
Fitzgerald's writings reveal only one side of a writer
whose second and final decade of work characterized a
life marred by alcoholism and financial difficulties,
troubled by personal tragedy, and frustrated by lack of
inspiration
The Great Gatsby: First published in 1925, it is set on Long Island's North
Shore and in New York City during the summer of 1922 and is a critique of
the American Dream. The novel chronicles an era
that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the "Jazz Age."
Following the shock and chaos of World War I,
American society enjoyed unprecedented levels
of prosperity during the "roaring" 1920s as the
economy soared. Meanwhile, Prohibition, the
ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as
mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made
millionaires out of bootleggers and led to an
increase in organized crime, for example the
mafia. Although Fitzgerald, like Nick Carraway
in his novel, idolized the riches and glamour of
the age, he was uncomfortable with the
unrestrained materialism and the lack of morality
that went with it, a kind of decadence.
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”: In Fitzgerald's story,
Benjamin Button is born as a feeble old man who ages in reverse. So
when he is "old" he looks very young. From a well-to-do family in
Baltimore, Maryland, Button finds life easier in the middle years, when
his biological and chronological ages fit in
with the rest of the world. It is only when
he is far too young at the end of his life
and far too old at the beginning that problems
arise. In the film version, Button is born in
1919. He ages backwards from old man to
baby, causing complications when he falls
in love with Daisy, a 30-year-old woman.
Fitzgerald noted "This story was inspired
by a remark of Mark Twain's to the effect
that it was a pity that the best part of life
came at the beginning and the worst part
at the end." Both novel and film versions
are dark portraits of romance and mortality.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4cYULvPdnI&feature=player_embe
dded#

Ernest Hemingway: (1899 –1961)
was an American writer and journalist. He was part of
the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of
the veterans of World War I later known as "the Los
Generation." He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for
The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1954. Hemingway's distinctive writing
style is characterized by economy and
understatement, and had a significant influence on the
development of 20th-century fiction writing. His
protagonists are typically stoical men who exhibit an
ideal described as "grace under pressure." Many of
his works are now considered classics of American
literature.

The “Lost Generation” is a term used to characterize
a general motif of disillusionment of American literary
notables who lived in Europe, most notably Paris,
after World War I. Figures identified with the “Lost
Generation” included authors and artists such as
Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound,
Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, and John
Steinbeck. The term was often credited to author and
poet Gertrude Stein an then popularized by Ernest
Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also
Rises and his memoir A Moveable Feast. (A few lines
later, recalling the risks and losses of the war, he
adds: "I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood
Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus
discipline and I thought 'who is calling who a lost
generation?'") Broadly, the term is often used to refer
to the younger literary modernists.

Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946) was an American
writer who spent most of her life in France, and who
became a catalyst in the development of modern art
and literature. An expatriate in Paris from 1903 until
her death, she presided over a salon that attracted the
avant garde and encouraged Modernism.
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Ezra Pound (1885 –1972) was an American expatriate poet,
critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist
movement in the first half of the 20th century. He is generally
considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting
a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth
century, he opened a fruitful exchange of work and ideas
between British and American writers, and was famous for the
generosity with which he advanced the work of such major
contemporaries as Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H. D.,
Ernest Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot. Pound also had a
profound influence on the Irish writers W. B. Yeats and James
Joyce. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his
promotion of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its
technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—
stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and
forgoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's
words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in
the sequence of the metronome." His later work, spanning
nearly fifty years, focused on his epic poem The Cantos.

William Faulkner (1897–1962) was a Nobel Prizewinning American author. One of the most influential
writers of the 20th century, his reputation is based on
his novels, novellas and short stories. He was also a
published poet and an occasional screenwriter. Most
of Faulkner's works are set in his native state of
Mississippi. He is considered one of the most
important Southern writers along with Mark Twain,
Flannery O'Connor, and Tennessee Williams. While his
work was published regularly starting in the mid 1920s,
Faulkner was relatively unknown before receiving the
1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Since then, he has
often been cited as one of the most important writers
in the history of American literature.
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William Faulkner
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Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was an American
poet, playwright, and literary critic, arguably the most
important English-language poet of the 20th century.
His first notable publication, The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock, begun in February 1910 and published in
Chicago in June 1915, is regarded as a masterpiece of
the modernist movement. It was followed by some of
the best-known poems in the English language,
including, The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men
(1925), and Four Quartets (1945). He is also known
for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the
Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
Eliot was educated at Harvard University. After
graduating in 1909, he studied philosophy at the
Sorbonne in Paris for a year, then won a scholarship to
Merton College, Oxford in 1914, becoming a British
citizen when he was 39.
The Waste Land is a 434 line Modernist
poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has
been called "one of the most important
poems of the 20th century." Despite what is
seen by some as the poem's obscurity – its
shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt
and unannounced changes of speaker,
location and time, its elegiac but intimidating
summoning up of a vast and dissonant range
of cultures and literatures – the poem has
nonetheless become a familiar touchstone of
modern literature. Among its famous phrases
are "April is the cruellest month" (its first line)
and "I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
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John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (1902–1968) was
an American writer. He wrote the Pulitzer Prizewinning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and the
novella Of Mice and Men (1937). He wrote a total
of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels,
six non-fiction books and five collections of short
stories. In 1962, Steinbeck received the Nobel
Prize for Literature.
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The Grapes of Wrath is a novel published in
1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Set
during the Great Depression, the novel
focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers,
the Joads, driven from their Oklahoma home
by drought, economic hardship, and changes
in the agriculture industry. In a nearly
hopeless situation, they set out for
California's Salinas Valley along with
thousands of other "Okies" in search of land,
jobs and
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Karl Heinrich Marx (1818 –1883) was a
German philosopher, political economist, historian,
political theorist, sociologist, communist and
revolutionary, whose ideas are credited as the
foundation of modern communism. Marx
summarized his approach in the first line of
chapter one of The Communist Manifesto,
published in 1848: “The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggles.”
Marx argued that capitalism, like previous
socioeconomic systems, will inevitably produce
internal tensions which will lead to its destruction.
Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, he believed
socialism will, in its turn, replace capitalism, and
lead to a stateless, classless society called pure
communism.

Historical materialism is a methodological
approach to the study of society, economics, and
history, first articulated by Marx. Marx himself never
used the term but referred to his approach as "the
materialist conception of history." Historical
materialism looks for the causes of developments
and changes in human society in the means by
which humans collectively produce the necessities
of life. The non-economic features of a society (e.g.
social classes, political structures, ideologies) are
seen as being an outgrowth of its economic activity.
The mode of production of material life conditions
the general process of social, political, and
intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men
that determines their existence, but their social
existence that determines their consciousness.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
Freud was an Austrian neurologist who founded the
psychoanalytic school of psychology. Freud is best
known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the
defense mechanism of repression and for creating the
clinical practice of psychoanalysis for treating
psychopathology through dialogue between a patient
and a psychoanalyst. Freud is also renowned for his
redefinition of sexual desire as the primary motivational
energy of human life, as well as his therapeutic
techniques, including the use of free association, his
theory of transference in the therapeutic relationship,
and the interpretation of dreams as sources of insight
into unconscious desires. While many of Freud's ideas
have fallen out of favor or have been modified by NeoFreudians, and modern advances in the field of
psychology have shown flaws in many of his theories. In
academia, his ideas continue to influence the
humanities and some social sciences.
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*Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) was a French
psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent
contributions to psychoanalysis, philosophy, and
literary theory. He gave yearly seminars, in Paris,
from 1953 to 1981, mostly influencing France's
intellectuals in the 1960s and the 1970s, especially
the post-structuralist philosophers. His
interdisciplinary work is Freudian, featuring the
unconscious, the castration complex, the ego;
identification; and language as subjective perception,
and thus he figures in critical theory, literary studies,
twentieth-century French philosophy, and clinical
psychoanalysis.
“Between Two Wars, 1913-1945”
Kathryn VanSpanckeren
1. disillusionment (第1段第5行): A feeling
arising from the discovery that something is
not what it was anticipated to be.
2. edifice (第1段第6行): a building, esp. one of
large size or imposing appearance
3. sham (第1段第7行): A fake; an imitation that
purports to be genuine; a spurious imitation;
fraud or hoax.
4. proclaim (第1段第7行): to declare publicly,
typically insistently, proudly.
5. amendment (第4段第4行): An addition to
and/or alteration of the U.S. Constitution
6. speakeasy (第4段第5行): a place where
alcoholic beverages are illegally sold, esp.
during the period of prohibition in the U.S.
7. extravagance (第7段第2行):
A. excessive outlay of money; wasteful
spending
B. immoderate or absurd speech or
behaviour
8. drought (第8段第4行): A long period of
abnormally low rainfall,
9. the intellectual (第9段第5行): a person who places a
high value on or pursues things of interest to the
intellect or the more complex forms and fields of
knowledge, as aesthetic or philosophical matters.
10. J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) was an
American theoretical physicist and professor of
physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is
best known for his role as the scientific director of the
Manhattan Project, the World War II effort to develop
the first nuclear weapons at the secret Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico. For this reason
he is remembered as “The Father of the Atomic
Bomb.”
Answer to Questions About the Reading
1. By “Civilization was a ‘vast edifice of sham, and
the war, instead of its crumbling, was its fullest
and most ultimate expression,’” the writer means
that the was civilization’s “fullest and the most
ultimate expression.” Namely, the war expressed
what civilization stood for. (94頁第6~7行)
2. The postwar boom in business caused the
successful and the middles class to prosper and
college enrollment to double. (95頁第1~3行)
3. The Nineteenth Amendment to the
Constitution gave women the right to vote. It
was passed in 1920. In addition to giving
women the right to vote, it also made women
feel “liberated.” The Eighteenth Amendment
to the Constitution prohibited the production,
transport, and sale of alcohol. Its effect was
contribute to the proliferation of nightclubs,
underground “speakeasies,” jazz, cocktails,
and “daring modes of dress and dance.” (95
頁第4段第3~6行;倒數第3~1行)
4. People’s attitudes towards business and
government changed from “the gospel” of
business proclaimed by President Calvin
Coolidge to support for an active role for the
New Deal government programs of Franklin
Roosevelt. The depression of the 1930’s
caused people’s attitudes towards business
and government to change. (96頁第9段第2~4
行)
Answer to Questions About the Writer’s
Strategies
1. The thesis of the essay: The United States
“came of age” or “grew up” in the period
between World War I and World War II.
2. The main idea of each paragraph:
(1) Americans lost their innocence.
(2) Soldiers wanted an urban life.
(3) Business and education flourished
and people prospered.
(4) Americans sought modern entertainment.
(5) Youth rebelled and were angry with
economic conditions that allowed
Americans to live well abroad on little money.
(6) Traditional values were undermined.
(7) Western civilization was symbolized by
novelists as needing spiritual renewal.
(8) The depression of the 1930s affected most
of the population of the United States.
(9) “The depression turned the world upside
down.”
3. Paragraphs 5, 6, and 7 could be combined
because they pertain to how Americans felt
and now novelists portrayed their
disillusionment and loss of traditional values.
“Death in the Open”
Lewis Thomas
1. outrage (第2段第3行): a wicked, wrong,
eveil act, especially of great violence
2. life expectancy (第5段第2行):the number of
years that an individual is expected to live
as determined by statistics
3. temperate zones: 溫帶。
寒帶: Frigid zones。熱帶: Torrid zone 。
4. disintegrate (第5段第2行): to become
reduced to components, fragments, or
particles
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Building Vocabulary (pay attention to)
1. a. queer shock
 a strange sudden feeling
b. unaccountable amazement:
 unexplained fascination
c. visible death
 death we see (or are aware of) openly
d. transient tissue
 moving, changing issue
e. ponderous ceremony
 heavy, clumsy, and
thought-provoking rite
f. neighboring acres
nearby land
g. natural marvel
something wondrous found in nature
h. vast morality
wide scale process of dying
i. relative secrecy
essentially without others knowing
j. transient survivors
those survivors who come and go
can’t last long
2. idiom
a. upwelling of grief
 a sudden overwhelming feeling of sorrow
b. catch sight of
 to see (as a discovery)
c. on the wing
 while flying
d. in time
 over s period of time
e. no grasp . . . of
 no understanding of
f. for cause
 for a specific identifiable reason
Thinking Critically about
the Essay
Understanding the Writer’s Ideas
1. Because they either blend into the natural
environment or usually go off someplace
hidden and alone to die. Because they
include all types; whereas in the city, we
usually see only dead dogs or cats on the
highways. Because it seems improper to
be there, and because he claims that we
are surrounded by “visible death.”
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2. That is something we think of only
as an idea, not as a real event. That
we become more aware of death as
a natural event in the “renewal and
replacement” process. Because it
will put us more in touch with our
surroundings and our own renewal
and replacement cycles.
3. Because they seem to become their
own offspring.
4. To make us question why death is not so
obvious—namely, we see so few dead
birds, yet all the thousands we see flying
around must dies somewhere. In that,
death is never as obvious as it seems that
it should be. He says it is more startling
than unexpectedly seeing a live bird.
Because it is uncommon. It is so out of
ordinary experience.
5. They usually go to find a concealed place
to die. If not, others in the herd will move
the body to a concealed place.
6. The “odd stump” is the thing which
seems out-of-place. The late autumn fly
dying on the front porch and the highway
dog or cat fatality.
7. He has always had a problem of
backyard squirrels, but he has never
seen a dead squirrel.
8. It is just as well: the fact that death is
usually concealed on nature. he feels
that if this were not so, we should be too
constantly aware of death.
9. (ironically) The fact that death is a normal,
daily process.
10. He says we try to conceal death as well. We
only really know of the deaths of people
close to us; we only minimally publicize the
life-death process in obituaries and birth
announcements. We speak of the dead in
low voices. This result is that we think of
deaths as “unnatural events, anomalies,
outrages,” and we remain unaware of the
enormity of the natural process. We speak
in low voices, perform ceremonies, scatter
bones, and send flowers.
11. In order that we can better understand,
and perhaps derive some comfort from
the fact that even our own deaths are
still part of a vast, ongoing natural
process. We must give up the idea
that death is “catastrophic, or
detestable, or avoidable, or even
strange.”
Understanding the Writer’s Techniques
1. The beginning of the 3rd paragraph:
“Everything in the world dies, but we
only know about it as a kind of
abstraction.” The last paragraph
reminds us of the ways in which we keep
this notion “a secret” and encourages us
to face the reality instead of the
abstraction.
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2. His point is that natural death is usually
hidden from us but indeed it should
be perceived more openly through a
heightened perception. The multiple
examples “open our eyes” to surrounding
death. “The mysterious wreckage” is
particularly vivid as an image which
affects the reader deeply by juxtaposition:
the horror of a wreck with the
gentleness of a deer.
3. The one illustration is “an animal dead on
a highway,” although this is not a specific
illustration because Thomas wants us to
feel first the generality of death.
Paragraph 3 widens the scope of
paragraph 2 so that death is recounted
not only as a natural occurrence but as a
part of the universal process of “constant
renewal and replacement.”
4. In paragraph 4-8, the first sentence of
each paragraph is the topic sentence.
The illustrated focus of each is as
follows:
4th: single-celled animal
5th: insects
6th: birds
7th: elephants
8th: common, “at home” observations
(the fly, backyard squirrels)
7th: concerning elephants makes use of
an extended example
8th: makes use of a personal observation
5. Paragraph 9 accomplishes a transition
between the illustrations of paragraph 48 and the discussion of the human
dealings with death—both to link the two
and to focus on the differences. The
enormity of the statistical figures reminds
us of the all-pervasiveness of death.
6. The first person pronouns help us to
personalize the essay, both to Thomas’
experience and to our own. In other words, he
“makes” us see what we usually don’t see. In
paragraph 8, especially, he uses such
pronouns to personalize the illustrations which
would be familiar to most of his readers. “It” is
used throughout to refer to either death itself,
the process of dying, or the result of death. By
using the pronoun multiply like this, Thomas is
able to reinforce the inclusiveness of death,
while at the same time emphasizing the
abstract value that he claims we place on it.
7. a. the mysterious wreckage of a deer:
the atrocity which leaves us with
an indecipherable feeling
b. episodes that seem as conclusive as
death:
final, without continuation
c. drifting through the layers of the
atmosphere like plankton:
swarming and directionless, like
the plankton (one-celled animals) in
the sea
8. “Drifting off like flies.” Namely, to fall, faint, or
die suddenly and in a group, one after another.
9. a. alone, hidden:
emphasizes the isolation aspect of
the process
b. each morning, each spring
 makes it simultaneously a daily
and a cyclical (seasonal)
occurrence
c. unusual events, anomalies, outrages
 like “alone, hidden,” this repetition
intensifies the feeling here of horrible
strangeness
d. catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or
even strange:
 In this sentence, Thomas wants us to
understand fully that we have to give
up all the abstractions we have
attributed to death.
10.
3rd: the repetition of IF denoting a
situation of possibility
10th: the repetition of WE to
accentuate how we (human
beings) deal with death within
our own species
11th: the repetition of WE used with
the future tense or implied future
action
10. parallelism: The use of identical or
equivalent syntactic constructions in
corresponding clauses or phrases.
e.g.
1. A deaf husband and a blind wife are always
a happy couple.
2. A university should be a place of light, of
liberty, and of learning.
3. Rather than love, than money, than fame,
give me truth.
4. The path of duty is the way to glory.
5. Treasure is not always a fried, but a friend is
always a treasure.
6. Pleasure is a sin and sometimes sin is a
pleasure.
7. Mankind must put an end to war—or war will put
an end to mankind.
—J.F.K.
8. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of
absence.
*antimetabole (chiasmus): Figure of emphasis in
which the words in one phrase or clause are
replicated, exactly or closely, in reverse
grammatical order in the next phrase or clause;
an inverted order of repeated words in adjacent
phrases or clauses (A-B, B-A). (anadiplosis)
Exploring the Writer’s Ideas
2. euphemism: The substitution of an agreeable or

inoffensive expression for one that may offend or
suggest something unpleasant ("passed
away“="died").
Other common euphemisms:
 restroom  toilet room
 making love to, playing with or sleeping with
 having sexual intercourse with
 bathroom tissue, or bath tissue  toilet paper
 downsizing, rightsizing, or laying off
 getting rid of employees