EXERCISE 5.2: Analyzing an essay
Johanna Abrams, a student was asked to write a narrative essay based on a personal experience that turned out to be a significant event or that represented a turning point—big or small—in her life. Read the essay carefully; then answer the following questions.
1.What is Abrams’s purpose?
2.Who do you think constitutes Abrams’s intended audience? What does the tone reveal about her attitude toward the topic?
3.How well does the thesis statement convey Abrams’s purpose and attitude? What claim does the thesis statement make? How specific is the statement? How well does it preview Abrams’s ideas and organization?
4.What organization does Abrams use? Is it clear throughout the essay?
5.What details, examples, and reasons does Abrams use to support her ideas? Where is the supporting evidence skimpy?
6.How successful is Abrams in making you care about the topic and her view of it?
Working in the Barnyard
Until two months ago I thought summer jobs occupied time and helped pay the next year’s tuition but otherwise provided no useful training. Then I took a temporary job in a large government agency. Two months there taught me the very valuable lesson that the hierarchy of supervisor to employee should be respected.
Last May I was hired by the personnel department of the agency to fill in for vacationing workers in the mail room. I had seven coworkers and a boss, Mrs. King. Our job was to sort the huge morning and afternoon mail shipments into four hundred slots, one for every employee in the agency. Then we delivered the sorted mail out of grocery carts that we wheeled from office to office along assigned corridors, picking up outgoing mail as we went along. Each mail delivery took an entire half-day to sort and deliver.
My trouble began almost as soon as I arrived. Hundreds of pieces of mail were dumped on a shallow table against a wall of mail slots. I was horrified to see that the slots were labeled not with people’s names but with their initials—whereas the incoming letters, of course, contained full names. Without thinking, I asked why this was a good idea, only to receive a sharp glance from Mrs. King. So I repeated the question. This time Mrs. King told me not to question what I didn’t understand. It was the first of many such exchanges, and I hadn’t been on the job a half-hour.
I mastered the initials and the sort and delivery procedures after about a week. But the longer I worked at the job, the more I saw how inefficient all the procedures were, from delivery routes to times for coffee breaks. When I asked Mrs. King about the procedures, however, she always reacted the same way: it was none of my business.
I pestered Mrs. King more and more over the next seven weeks, but my efforts were fruitless, even counterproductive. Mrs. King began calling me snide names. Then she began picking on my work and singling me out for reprimands, even though I did my best and worked faster than most of the others.
Two months after I had started work, the personnel manager called me in and fired me. I objected, of course, calling up all the deficiencies I had seen in Mrs. King and her systems. The manager interrupted to ask if I had ever heard of the barnyard pecking order. As he explained it, the top chicken pecks on the one below it, the second pecks on the third, and son on all the way down the line to the lowliest chicken, whose life is a constant misery. Mrs. King, the manager said, was the lowliest chicken at the bottom of the pecking order in the agency’s management. With little education, she had spent her entire adult life building up her small domain, and she had to protect it from everyone, especially the people who worked for her. The arbitrariness of her systems was an assertion of her power, for no one should doubt for a moment she had ruled her roost.
I had a month before school began again to think about my adventure. At first it irritated me that I should be humiliated while Mrs. King continued on as before. But eventually I saw how arrogant, and how unsympathetic, my behavior had been. In my next job, I’ll learn the pecking order before I become a crusader, if I do.
—Johanna Abrams (student)
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