Unit 6 Question 2

The text that I will be talking about in my blog is a short story named, “Roads to Quoz, An American Mosey.” It was written by a man named William Least Heat-Moon. This story has a unique sense of form, structure, and language thus making it very interesting. 

To begin, the form of this text is a piece of narrative writing which is a style of writing used in order to tell a story. The author is talking about his past and because of that, it would be referred to as part of the past tense. This also is in the first person and it is easy to tell due to the fact that it uses terms such as, “I expected the customary,” or “I finished our hoagies.” This first-person perspective gives us additional information that we would not happen to know about if it were in any other person's perspective because we know all of the emotions and thoughts that the main character is experiencing throughout the entirety of the story. 

Another part of the story that is very important in the writing process is the structure of this. The layout of this consisted of a decent amount of text in the introduction to address the situation, followed by a small body paragraph, and ending with another large piece of text to end the conclusion. The total was three paragraphs with a fairly large quantity of text throughout the story. This large amount of text is perfect for a story because it gives the author time to get their point across without spacing it out too much. Another thing it does is allow for the text to be able to have the perfect description and tone in the setting without transitioning too much to where it would not be effective for the reader to read. This also is set up in chronological order, starting from the beginning to end, and goes there without taking any jumps or twists in the story. Chronological order helps the reader know what is going on because it lists events as they actually happen in real-time rather than in a random scramble of events. This is also a nonfiction tale because it is written based on real events that actually happened and are not made up. 

Furthermore, we have the unique language addressed in the text. Among this passage, there is a vast variety of words that are not used very often in most pieces of writing such as the words, “grinder,” “zeppelin,” and “hoagie.” The author used these nouns in order to show the normality in which that sort of slang is used simply just to order a sandwich. There were also some literary devices used in the text to enhance the writing which was alliteration or using the same letter at the beginning of each word. In the text, it states, “Pat stuffed green peppers, banana peppers, pepperoni, pimiento olives…” This shows how the letter P was repeated in order to make us see the different foods. There was also slight imagery involved in that quote because I could visualize the symbolism trying to be made through the quote to describe the food. The tone came off to me as pretty casual and not as if the writer was trying to make the text seem to be very important to the point where it would strike as formal. The writer also did a very good job of using several different adjectives to describe the text and to help develop the story a lot better than if there were none. The author used a sense of surprise in his writing which made it very different from normal writing and because of that, it was very intriguing.