Where are the four elements of voice, style, structure,and idea in E.B White's essay?

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Humanities

ENG 125

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  1. Read the E.B. White essay "Once More to the Lake" and Review the four elements Voice, Style, Structure, and Ideas.
  2. Voice: Friendly or hostile, stuffy or casual, self-assured or tentative, intimate or ironic. The possibilities are as endless as the number of essayists. How does your chosen quotation represent White's persona in this essay?
  3. Style: Writers make specific choices in words, syntax, sentence length, metaphors, repetition and many other ways to manipulate language and create a unique sound in their writing. How does your chosen quotation represent White's unique style?
  4. Structure: How does your chosen quotation represent White's structure?
  5. Ideas: Readers of essays are in one sense miners, unearthing hidden meanings. In another sense, they are like co-producers in creating meaning. How does your chosen quotation uncover the meaning of the essay?
  6. Write an outline where you Locate and Explain quotations from White's essay that represent each of the four elements above. Write a paragraph explaining why you chose each quote.

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STRUCTURE IN LITERARY ESSAYS Introduction ▪ You may have been assigned an essay in the past called “Cause and Effect Essay” or “Process Analysis Essay” but those limited structures are rarely found in published essays. ▪ Published, literary essays employ a combination of structural or development techniques to add more variety and interest. ▪ We will learn several types of structures and development techniques in this presentation. Description ▪ Writers add color and interest to their writing with plenty of description, appealing to the five senses. ▪ Topic: In Pennsylvania where I grew up, many people show signs of being smokers. ▪ Description: “Everywhere you go you can see people with tubes leading from their noses, behind their ears, and over to portable oxygen tanks: in grocery stores, in cars, at Bingo night in the neighborhood church.” Examples ▪ Writers often start a paragraph with a general statement, but then once they have established a topic, give specific examples that will stick in the reader’s mind. ▪ Topic: Many people are still cigarette smokers despite the health risks. ▪ Example: “The first of my relatives to die of cigarette-smoking related ailments was my grandfather, who succumbed to heart failure at 67.” Narration (Storytelling) ▪ Stories grab the reader’s attention and can help make an abstract or general point unforgettable. ▪ Topic: There is always someone in my family smoking. ▪ Narration: “My father even smoked while he was changing clothes. He would be smoking as he rushed to get out of his overalls, coated with oil from the shift at Midas Mufflers and into his bartender clothes.” Definition ▪ Writers often place a difficult word or idea into a recognizable category and then explain how it is different from all others. ▪ Topic: Microcredit loans ▪ Definition: “These small loans, as little as $25, go to the poorest people, mostly women living on $1 a day or less. These loans could protect against terrorism by undermining the poverty that feeds social decay and destruction.” Process Analysis ▪ Describing a process may be an important element of an essay. ▪ Topic: Autopsies ▪ Process: “For the benefit of readers who are interested, here’s what generally happens during a forensic autopsy: The first step is to photograph the body. Trace evidence such as hair samples and nail scrapings are collected, and fingerprints taken.” Compare/Contrast ▪ By comparing an unfamiliar subject to a familiar one, writers help readers gain a context for a topic. ▪ Topic: American Impressionism ▪ Compare/Contrast: “American impressionists such as John H. Twachtman, Childe Hassam, Theodore Robinson, and Mary Cassatt were influenced by the French painter in the 1890s and into the early 20th century. Like their French counterparts, they were interested in recreating the sensation of light in nature and used intense colors and similar dab or fleck brushstrokes, but they departed with the French painter’s avant garde approach to form.” Cause and Effect ▪ Writers often explore the reasons an event or trend occurred or discuss its aftereffects. ▪ Topic: The Great Depression ▪ Cause and Effect: “The Great Depression was the worst economic slump ever in U.S. history and one which spread to virtually all of the industrialized world. The main cause was the greatly unequal distribution of wealth throughout the 1920’s.” Conclusion ▪ Structure is an integral element of the literary essay. ▪ Writers make choices about how to employ a variety of structures within their essays to create an interesting reading experience, and to best convey their desired meaning and purpose. ▪ Structural varieties include: description, narration, examples, process analysis, definition, compare/contrast, and cause/effect. Once More to the Lake E.B. White, August 1941 ONE SUMMER, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August. We all got ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond’s Extract on our arms and legs night and morning, and my father rolled over in a canoe with all his clothes on; but outside of that the vacation was a success and from then on none of us ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake in Maine. We returned summer after summer—always on August 1 for one month. I have since become a salt-water man, but sometimes in summer there are days when the restlessness of the tides and the fearful cold of the sea water and the incessant wind that blows across the afternoon and into the evening make me wish for the placidity of a lake in the woods. A few weeks ago this feeling got so strong I bought myself a couple of bass hooks and a spinner and returned to the lake where we used to go, for a week’s fishing and to revisit old haunts. I took along my son, who had never had any fresh water up his nose and who had seen lily pads only from train windows. On the journey over to the lake I began to wonder what it would be like. I wondered how time would have marred this unique, the holy spot—the coves and streams, the hills that the sun set behind, the camps and the paths behind the camps. I was sure that the tarred road would have found it out, and I wondered in what other ways it would be desolated. It is strange how much you can remember about places like that once you allow your mind to return into the grooves that lead back. You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing. I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen. The partitions in the camp were thin and did not extend clear to the top of the rooms, and as I was always the first up I would dress softly so as not to wake the others, and sneak out into the sweet outdoors and start out in the canoe, keeping close along the shore in the long shadows of the pines. I remembered being very careful never to rub my paddle against the gunwale for fear of disturbing the stillness of the cathedral. The lake had never been what you would call a wild lake. There were cottages sprinkled around the shores, and it was in farming country although the shores of the lake were quite heavily wooded. Some of the cottages were owned by nearby farmers, and you would live at the shore and eat your meals at the farmhouse. That’s what our family did. But although it wasn’t wild, it was a fairly large and undisturbed lake and there were places in it that, to a child at least, seemed infinitely remote and primeval. I was right about the tar: it led to within half a mile of the shore. But when I got back there, with my boy, and we settled into a camp near a farmhouse and into the kind of summertime I had known, I could tell that it was going to be pretty much the same as it had been before—I knew it, lying in bed the first morning, smelling the bedroom and hearing the boy sneak quietly out and go off along the shore in a boat. I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. This sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. It was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much stronger. I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture. It gave me a creepy sensation. We went fishing the first morning. I felt the same damp moss covering the worms in the bait can, and saw the dragonfly alight on the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of the water. It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and that there had been no years. The small waves were the same, checking the rowboat under the chin as we fished at anchor, and the boat was the same boat, the same color green and the ribs broken in the same places, and under the floorboards the same fresh-water leaving and debris—the dead hellgrammite, the wisps of moss, the rusty discarded fishhook, the dried blood from yesterday’s catch. We stared silently at the tips of our rods, at the dragonflies that came and went. I lowered the tip of mine into the water, tentatively, pensively dislodging the fly, which darted two feet away, poised, darted two feet back, and came to rest again a little farther up the rod. There had been no years between the ducking of this dragonfly and the other one—the one that was part of memory. I looked at the boy, who was silently watching his fly, and it was my hands that held his rod, my eyes watching. I felt dizzy and didn’t know which rod I was at the end of. We caught two bass, hauling them in briskly as though they were mackerel, pulling the over the side of the boat in a businesslike manner without any landing net, and stunning them with a blow on the back of the head. When we got back for a swim before lunch, the lake was exactly where we had left it, the same number of inches from the dock, and there was only the merest suggestion of a breeze. This seemed an utterly enchanted sea, this lake you could leave to its own devices for a few hours and come back to, and find that it had not stirred, this constant and trustworthy body of water. In the shallows, the dark, water-soaked sticks and twigs, smooth and old, were undulating in clusters on the bottom against the clean ribbed sand, and the track of the mussel was plain. A school minnows swam by, each minnow with its small individual shadow, doubling the attendance, so clear and sharp in the sunlight. Some of the other campers were in swimming, along the shore, one of them with a cake of soap, and the water felt thin and clear and unsubstantial. Over the years there had been this person with the cake of soap, this cultist, and here he was. There had been no years. Up to the farmhouse to dinner through the teeming, dusty field, the road under our sneakers was only a two-track road. The middle track was missing, the one with the marks of the hooves and the splotches of dried, flaky manure. There had always been three tracks to choose from in choosing which track to walk in; now the choice was narrowed down to two. For a moment I missed terribly the middle alternative. But the way led past the tennis court, and something about the way it lay there in the sun reassured me; the tape had loosened along the backline, the alleys were green with plantains and other weeds, and the net (installed in June and removed in September) sagged in the dry noon, and the whole place steamed with midday heat and hunger and emptiness. There was a choice of pie for dessert, and one was blueberry and one was apple, and the waitresses were the same country girls, there having been no passage of time, only the illusion of it as in a dropped curtain—the waitresses were still fifteen; their hair had been washed, that was the only difference—they had been to the movies and seen the pretty girls with the clean hair. Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottagers with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp and the paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and at the souvenir counters at the store the miniature birch-bark canoes and the postcards that showed things looking a little better than they looked. This was the American family at play, escaping the city heat, wondering whether the newcomers in the camp at the head of the cove were “common” or “nice,” wondering whether it was true that the people who drove up for Sunday dinner at the farmhouse were turned away because there wasn’t enough chicken. It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times and those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving. There had been jollity and peace and goodness. The arriving (at the beginning of August) had been so big a business in itself, at the railway station the farm wagon drawn up, the first smell of the pine-laden air, the first glimpse of the smiling farmer, and the great importance of the trunks and your father’s enormous authority in such matters, and the feel of the wagon under our for the long ten-mile haul, and at the top of the last long hill catching the first view of the lake after eleven months of not seeing this cherished body of water. The shouts and cries of the other campers when they saw you, and the trunks to be unpacked, to give up their rich burden. (Arriving was less exciting nowadays, when you sneaked up in your car and parked it under a tree near the camp and took out the bags and in five minutes it was all over, no fuss, no loud wonderful fuss about trunks.) …. We had a good week at camp. The bass were biting well and the sun shone endlessly, day after day. We would be tired at night and lie down in the accumulated heat of the little bedrooms after the long hot day and the breeze would stir almost imperceptibly outside and the smell of the swamp drift in through the rusty screens. Sleep would come easily and in the morning the red squirrel would be on the roof, tapping out his gay routine. I kept remembering everything, lying in bed in the mornings—the small steamboat that had a long rounded stern like the lip of a Ubangi, and how quietly she ran on the moonlight sails, when the older boys played their mandolins and the girls sang and we ate doughnuts dipped in sugar, and how sweet the music was on the water in the shining night, and what it had felt like to think about girls then…. We explored the streams, quietly, where the turtles slid off the sunny logs and dug their way into the soft bottom; and we lay on the town wharf and fed worms to the tame bass. Everywhere we went I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants. One afternoon while we were there at that lake a thunderstorm came up. It was like the revival of an old melodrama that I had seen long ago with childish awe…. In midafternoon (it was all the same) a curious darkening of the sky, and a lull in everything that had made life tick; and then they way the boats suddenly swung the other way at their moorings with the coming of a breeze out of the new quarter, and the premonitory rumble. Then the kettle drum, then the snare, then the bass drum and cymbals, then crackling light against the dark, and the gods grinning and licking their chops in the hills. Afterward the calm, the rain steadily rustling in the calm lake, the return of light and hope and spirits, and the campers running out in joy and relief to go swimming in the rain, their bright cries perpetuating the deathless joke about how they were getting simply drenched, and the children screaming with delight at the new sensation of bathing in the rain, and the joke about getting drenched linking the generations in a strong indestructible chain. And the comedian who waded in carrying an umbrella. When the others went swimming, my son said he was going in, too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower and wrong them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death. White, E.B. Essays of E.B. White. Perennial Classics. New York: HarperCollins, 1977. Print.
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Explanation & Answer

Hi there, kindly see attachment. Actually I have check it first on my turnitin and the quotaion have been plagiarized, but, it is okay because your taecher instructed to choose a quotations from essay to be outline :)

Once More To The Lake

The Essay of Once More to the Lake, written by E.B. White is very inspirational and
meaningful. It is a kind of reflection of a father during his childhood, going to the Lake together
with his son and observe once again those memorable things around the Lake. In this essay, there
are some quotations that represent and reflects the persona of Whites in his own writing. These
showcased the four elements of the writing: voice, style, structure, and the ideas. The voice
element described of being friendly or hostile, casual, self-assured, intimate or ironic.

Voice

The quotation in this essay that exemplifies how the voice of the author has been delivered and
reflects its persona was "I was right about the tar: it led to within half a mile of the shore. But
when I got back there, with my boy, and we settled into a camp near a farmhouse and into the
kind of summertime I had known, I could tell that it was going to be pretty much the same as it
had been before—I knew it, lying in bed the first morning, smelling the bedroom and hearing the
boy sneak quietly out and go off al...


Anonymous
Just what I needed…Fantastic!

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