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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