This document provides an analysis of Gordon Grice's essay "The Black Widow". It summarizes Grice's background as a nature writer from Kansas and discusses how his essay attracts readers' attention through vivid descriptions of black widow spiders and his personal experiences with them from childhood. The analysis then examines Grice's writing style, including his use of diction, metaphor, and sentence structure to engage audiences interested in learning about black widow spiders. Specific examples are provided of Grice's descriptions of black widow web-making and his recounting of his mother killing one as a child, aimed at demonstrating his writing techniques.
This document provides an analysis of Gordon Grice's essay "The Black Widow". It summarizes Grice's background as a nature writer from Kansas and discusses how his essay attracts readers' attention through vivid descriptions of black widow spiders and his personal experiences with them from childhood. The analysis then examines Grice's writing style, including his use of diction, metaphor, and sentence structure to engage audiences interested in learning about black widow spiders. Specific examples are provided of Grice's descriptions of black widow web-making and his recounting of his mother killing one as a child, aimed at demonstrating his writing techniques.
This document provides an analysis of Gordon Grice's essay "The Black Widow". It summarizes Grice's background as a nature writer from Kansas and discusses how his essay attracts readers' attention through vivid descriptions of black widow spiders and his personal experiences with them from childhood. The analysis then examines Grice's writing style, including his use of diction, metaphor, and sentence structure to engage audiences interested in learning about black widow spiders. Specific examples are provided of Grice's descriptions of black widow web-making and his recounting of his mother killing one as a child, aimed at demonstrating his writing techniques.
This document provides an analysis of Gordon Grice's essay "The Black Widow". It summarizes Grice's background as a nature writer from Kansas and discusses how his essay attracts readers' attention through vivid descriptions of black widow spiders and his personal experiences with them from childhood. The analysis then examines Grice's writing style, including his use of diction, metaphor, and sentence structure to engage audiences interested in learning about black widow spiders. Specific examples are provided of Grice's descriptions of black widow web-making and his recounting of his mother killing one as a child, aimed at demonstrating his writing techniques.
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Style Analysis The Black Widow and My Cultural Upbringing and Challenges
Introduction: The Black Widow written By Gordon Grice a amateur naturalist who teaches humanities and English at Seward County Community College in Kansas. Gordon Grice's writing about the black widow spider has appeared in High Plains Literary Review and Harper's. It has been anthologized in Houghton Mifflin's Best American Essays 1996 and in college readers. The Black Widow essay attract my attention because of my personal cultural experience with Black Widow and the perception that people have in my culture. Also the commencement of the essay I HUNT BLACK WIDOW. When I find one, I capture it. (Para1). He uses the above statement to attract the readers attention and interest and proceed by narrating how Black Widow create a web and the complexities of getting prey for consumption into the web and his alarming fascination and personal experience which rooted from his childhood. Grice states my mother took me and my sister into the cellar of our farmhouse and told us to watch as she killed a widow. (para 15). what a horrifying situation for a child to watch his/her mother in such manner not only that, but also the widows egg sac. He states that she did so by smashing it with a long stick to further demonstrate the widows evil deeds. It was not enough for his mother to kill the widow but her future offspring as well. Their remains scraped and splattered on the cellar floor, untouched by human hands and destroyed by the ever powerful mother. The analysis of this essay will be compare to my reflective essay, My Cultural Upbringing and Challenges looking at various stylistic features. Audience Analysis Grice is best known as the author of The Red Hourglass: including of other essay such as Lives of the Predators, a cult classic about black widows, and so forth. If Cormac McCarthy turned his hand to nature writing, the results might sound something like Grice, who combines the laconic banter of rural Oklahoma, where he grew up, with a country boy's inexhaustible curiosity about the natural world. His curiosity and observations narrates to the audience that interested in know about the malignant nature
of the spider, the widow Spiders in particular. Even though reading the introduction of the essay at first glace seems like it is a zoologist studies however, Grice personal curiosity and observation makes the essay sound like a monster story at times referring to one who are interesting in finding out more about a creepy, crawly, nasty tiny little species (Black Widom Spider) marking the essay great to get kids started on taking interest with biology. Diction and Metaphor Having read the essay The Black Widow, I an now well acquainted with the writing style of Grice. He is an elegant writer. His description of the Widow Spider are
wonderful, disturbing and vivid .
Especially reading about the web making habits of the Black Widow Spider fascinated me and I spent hours reading about creature I usually found repulsive when I found them. I an now with a new respect for the creatures living in my backyard. The essay was a extremely enjoyable read engages me well into the essay with his curious and alarming mixture observation of the natural word. The diction and Grice choice of words use was well suited to the audience. I will be discussing various figure of speech used by Grice.
The sentence structure of Black Widow Spider writen by
Grice...........He uses many .type of sentence as evidenced of my quantitative analysis of sentence types. .. Grice also use short sentence which I will explains how it affect the flow of the essay. ............. In the first 5 paragraph Grice uses multiple sentences to narrates his obsession with black widow in first person pronouns and then came up with a four words sentence A hyperbole figure of speech I have never been Bitten Grice aim is to persuade his general audience that in as much that people may think that Black Widow is dangerous, it's ok to interact with it like he did. Grice uses various figures of speech the essay narrating how fascinated he is with black widows which rooted from an event in his childhood. Grice states my mother took me and my sister into the cellar of our farmhouse and told us to watch as she killed a widow. what a horrifying situation to have a child watched his or her mother kill a creatures in an awful manner. In paragrapg 8 , Grice writes that Widow attaches some line to the prey with a leg-bicycing toss,
moves up the vertical web strand that originally snagged the prey, crosses a diagonal strand upward to a higher point on a different vertical strand, and here secures the line. It thus dragged the prey's body up off the ground. The who operation is like that of a person moving a load with block and tackle. It occurs in three dimentions- as opposed to the essentially two Dimentional operation of orb weavers and sheet weavers.
