Bedford Reader Questions

Questions on Writing Strategy

1. The author uses the "I would..." repetitively to show that his confused feeling as a child was so vivid in his memory. This vivid memory and the author's way of expressing it makes the reader feel more part of the time period that it was written in.

2. The last paragraph is effective because White uses very descriptive details, such as "buckled the swollen belt" to explain the accounts of his son jumping in the water just like he had once done and as the son jumped in the water White felt the chills that he had felt once when he was a child.

3. It is meant to tell how small things could bring back memories of bigger events and that even though you regret doing things in your own time, when it comes to letting your own children do things, it has to become their own choice. They must find things out on their own. It is appeasable to audiences of all ages and aspects but only the middle-aged audiences would really have a first-hand account to relate to it. It is very comprehensible to people whose vacations were not spent at a Maine summer cottage because they could have been spent elsewhere and had the same effect.

4. The tone of this essay is quiet yet engaging. The quiet tone makes the reader feel as though White is talking one on one with them. It is engaging in this tone because it is more of a personal memory that White wants to share with the audience. For example, White uses the simple yet sophisticated sentence saying "We had a good week at camp." This can be interpreted in many ways, but White is simply telling the reader in a simplistic and quiet tone that camp was good. This is also still very engaging because the simplicity of it makes the reader curious as to what made it a good week at camp.

5. White finds that the essence and aura stay the same when he revisits the same lake he had once visited before, but his childhood look of the lake was different. He also notes that there were more sounds the second time he visited the lake because of more advanced engines. The lake was more of a wild lake and when his son was there it was still the same.

Questions on Language

1. skip

2. White's