Modes & Syntax
Name: ________________________________ Period: ______
“Ring Leader” by Natalie Kusz
Directions
1) MODES:
 Read the following excerpt from the essay “Ring Leader,” paying close attention to the modes that author
Natalie Kusz uses.
 Work with your genre group to identify and underline the modes according to the following color-coded
key. You may need to underline some sentences more than once to show how Kusz blends different modes.
 In the margin, identify what you notice about how the author blends modes to affect the audience and
accomplish her purpose.
2) SYNTAX:
 Review the Introduction to Syntax handout to remind yourself about the different ways to analyze how the
writer manipulates Syntax for stylistic effect in creating coherence and cohesion.
 Working with your group, use a black colored pencil to annotate the things you notice about the syntax in
this excerpt.
Cause/Effect = Green
Narrative = Red
Description = Purple
Exemplification = Yellow
Expository = Blue
Thus, if you add the oversized body to the disfigured face, and add again my family
low income and my secondhand wardrobe, you have a formula for pure, excruciating
teenage angst. Hiding from public scrutiny became for me, as for many people like me, a
way of life. I developed a bouncy sense of humor, the kind that makes people say, “That
Natalie, she is always so up” and keeps them from probing for deep emotion. After
teaching myself to sew, I made myself cheap versions of those Popular Patty clothes or at
least the items (never halter tops, although this was the seventies) that a large girl could
wear with any aplomb. And above all, I studied the other kids, their physical posture,
their music, their methods of blow-dryer artistry, hoping one day to emerge from my
body, invisible. I suppose I came as close to invisibility as my appearance would allow,
for if you look at the yearbook photos from that time, you will find on my face the same
“too cool to say ‘cheese’” expression as on Popular Patty’s eleven-man entourage. . .
I grew depressed. Before long, I was feeling nostalgic for Alaskan eccentricities I had
avoided even when I had lived there—unshaven legs and armpits, for example, and
automobiles held together entirely by duct tape. I began decorating my office with absurd
and nonprofessional items: velvet paintings, Mr. Potato Head, and a growing collection
of snow globes from each of the fifty states. Students took to coming by to play with
Legos, or to blow bubbles from those little circular wands, and a wish started to grow in
my brain, a yearning for some way to transport the paraphernalia around with me, to
carry it along as an indication that I was truly unconventional at heart.
So the week that I received tenure, when they could no longer fire me and when a sore
nose would not get bumped during the course of any future sucking-up maneuver, I
entered a little shop in the black-leather part of town and emerged within minutes with
my right nostril duly pierced. The gesture was, for me, a celebration, a visible statement
that said, “Assume nothing. I might be a punk from Hennepin Avenue, or a belly dancer
with brass knuckles in my purse.” Polite as was the society of that region, my colleagues
never referred to my nose, but I could see them looking and wondering a bit, which was
exactly the thing I had wanted—a lingering question in the minds of the natives the
possibility of forces they had never fathomed.
After this, my comfort level changed some, and almost entirely for the better. I had
warned my father, who lived with me those years, that I was thinking of piercing my
nose. When I arrived home that day and the hole was through the side instead of the
center—he had expected, I found out, a Maori-style bone beneath the nostrils—he looked
at me, his color improved, and he asked if I wanted chicken for dinner. So that was all
fine. At school, students got over their initial shock relatively quickly, having already
seen the trailer-park ambience of my office, and they became less apt to question my
judgment on their papers; I could hear them thinking, She looks like she must understand
something about where I’m coming from. And my daughter—this is the best part of all—
declared I was the hippest parent she knew, and decided it was O.K. to introduce me to
her junior high friends; even Cool Chris—the Midwestern variety of Popular Patty—
couldn’t boast a body-pierced mom.