Exercises

Exercise #1: Directions: Rewrite the following sentences by employing definite, specific, concrete language for the indefinite, vague, and loose language in bold. Your rewrites should become paragraphs.

1. Winters are severe in Idaho. Though sometimes a thaw warms the air, the temperature usually stays very cold, and occasionally it drops to astonishing lows.

1.

2. He drove his vehicle very fast over rugged terrain. But halfway though his back country journey, his vehicle stalled in a river. It was really scary.

2.

3. I like the poem "Design." It has a lot of cool images about witches and stuff. It is very meaningful in the way it expresses itself. It is sort of interesting how the color white becomes bad when it is usually seen as good.

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth-

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witches' broth-

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall?-

If design govern in a thing so small.

-Robert Frost

3.

ANSWERS:

Exercise #1: Directions: Rewrite the following sentences by employing definite, specific, concrete language for the indefinite, vague, and loose language in bold. Your rewrites should become paragraphs.

1. Winters are severe in Idaho. Though sometimes a thaw warms the air, the temperature usually stays very cold, and occasionally it drops to astonishing lows.

1. Winters in Idaho are severe as the temperature at night rarely exceeds the low teens and the temperature during the day rarely exceeds 30 degrees. Each year we go winter camping in the Sawtooth Mountains, and, inevitably, it is the coldest week of the year. We leave the parking lot on telemark skis at 8:30am, and the tenmperature is usually about 7 degrees. Although hiking on skis warms the body and an occasional warm wind breaks the wind chill, we arrive in the meadow at 5:00pm and return to the 7 degrees of the morning temperature. We sleep in our snow caves as the temperature dips below zero in the chill of the night air. When I awoke in the morning this year, my wrist watch has stopped working due to the cold.

2. He drove his vehicle very fast over rugged terrain. But halfway though his back country journey, his vehicle stalled in a river. It was really scary.

2. Zac drove his navy, Ford F250 truck up Quigley Canyon after a rain. The dirt road was a foot of mud and muck, and no one had pioneered a track on this four wheeler's dream road. Zac likes to go fast in untouched mud, so he kept the truck in third gear, revved the RPM's to 5,000, fishtailed down the road and topped out at 50 miles an hour. Mud and muck flew past the passenger windows and left a roostertail of mud spray behind the truck. It look like the truck was waterskiing.

Zac came upon a river crossing. The water was moving fast, fast enough to knock down a person and sweep him away not to be seen again.

Zac decided that if he met the river at top speed then he would be able to make it across with very little movement down river. Well, he floored it and hit the river going about 35 miles per hour. The water rushed over the top of the hood, and the engine stalled. I opened the passenger door, the downriver door, and swam out. Zac followed behind me. We swam for our lives and felt the pull of the current taking us around the bend in the river. The truck was out of sight. We both managed to find an eddy at the bend and make it to shore. Zac looked at me with his mouth open. River water dripped from his face, his clothes were soaked, and one of his shoes was lost. We stood in shocked silence, thankful to be alive and on firm ground.

3. I like the poem "Design." It has a lot of cool images about witches and stuff. It is very meaningful in the way it expresses itself. It is sort of interesting how the color white becomes bad when it is usually seen as good.

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth-

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witches' broth-

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall?-

If design govern in a thing so small.

-Robert Frost

3.Robert Frost's poem "Design" is fascinating on two different levels. On one level, it is a poem about an observant speaker who finds meaning in even the smallest "designs" in nature. On another level, it is a philospohical inquiry into the intentions of the great designer, the creator of the smallest "designs" in nature. We expect it to be a gentle, calming sonnet about the beautiful intricacies in the smallest creatures in nature but it is really an indictment of the creator for making the universe so "appallingly" sinister in its actions.

The color white is usually associated with innocence, virginity, and purity, but here the color white is a mask, as it is on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, for the vindictive intentions of an evil creator who "steers" white moths into spider webs in which a white spider devours the white moth ravenously and remorselessly. Robert Frost wants to know how we can live in and accept a world in which callous killing occurs from the most seeming innocent, virginal, and pure creatures. Once you read this poem, you can never look at nature the same way again.