Was it a meteor strike?

Today in class we read an excerpt of a National Geographic article on how a meteor strike could cause the Apocalypse. If you want to read the entire article, click here. The date of the catastrophic meteor strike has been updated to 2068. Check out Dr. Tholen's latest findings.

One of the scientists featured in the article was Dr. David Tholen, who is the uncle of English 10 teacher Ms. Rachel Tholen Hatten. So Ms. Hatten contacted her uncle for more details about what the world would be like so that we could prove or disprove that Cormac McCarthy thought a meteor strike would cause the end of the world as we know it.

Here's the email response from Dr. Tholen:


From: David Tholen
To: Rachel Tholen Hatten
Sent: Mon, October 19, 2009 1:16:11 AM
Subject: Re: Meteor strike


Ms. Hatten: Question for you. Next week, I'll start teaching Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road, to my sophomores. I don't know if you've read it,

Dr. Tholen: Nope, haven't read it.

Ms. Hatten: It's the story of a father and son struggling to stay alive in a post-apocalyptic world. McCarthy never explicitly says what the cataclysmic event was that destroyed the earth and civilization, but I think it was probably a meteor strike. When you have a second, could you email me a description of what the world would be like if Earth suffered a major meteor strike, both short and long-term effects?

Dr. Tholen: Well, a lot depends on the size of the strike. We had a strike last October over the northern Sudan, but all we got out of it was a bright flash and a nice collection of Ureilite meteorites. A strike the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs raised enough dust into the
stratosphere to block out sunlight for years. If you've ever seen the sky after a major volcanic eruption, you might begin to imagine what it's like, only many times worse. Also, it's believed that a major firestorm would be triggered by the impact, generating a lot of soot that would remain in the lower part of the atmosphere for a shorter amount of time. With sunlight blocked off, photosynthesis stops, and plants die out. Without plants for food, livestock starts to die out.
Without livestock for food, people start to die out. It becomes a fight over dwindling food supplies. Very much the sort of thing imagined for the so-called "nuclear winter." Unlike nuclear winter, where radioactivity can persist for a long time, depending on the isotopes producing the radiation, asteroid winter lasts only a few years. As the atmosphere begins to clear, the Earth starts to warm up again. But wait! The impact released a huge amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, from the carbonate locked in a lot of bedrock. Now we've got the greenhouse effect going, and the Earth could be too hot for decades until plant life regains a foothold and starts to consume the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Ms. Hatten: I'd like to be able to share your response with the students, so they could have some real knowledge of what we'd be facing if something like that happened.

Dr. Tholen: Some books have been written about it. Might make for a non-fiction reading assignment for your students. A few years ago, Gaddy Bergmann sent me a copy of his book, The Migration of the Kamishi, which is intended to become a trilogy. In this fiction, Apophis did hit and nearly wiped out humanity. But some did survive, basically sending mankind back to the stone age. Interesting book. The author's power of description of living things is what caught my eye. The plot isn't quite as strong, and I did encounter some technical errors (the waning crescent Moon is a before dawn sight, not an after dusk sight).

Morphology

Today in class we are going to transform our vocabulary words by changing the word into its other parts of speech so that we discover how all of our words become verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs. William Shakespeare loved to transform words, and if you understand word affixes (prefixes and suffixes), you can uncover Shakespeare's meanings.

Passage Analysis Paragraph

Point: Identify rhetorical elements and introduce the effect on the reader
Illustration: Quotes
Explanation/Analysis: Pull out ideas about how the style of the quote is connected to the theme of the entire novel

McCarthy’s asserts that the post-apocalyptic world is both literally and figuratively hell on earth, in which evil threatens to overtake any remaining goodness in the world. He begins literally by vividly describing the entire country as being “looted, ransacked and ravaged. Rifled of every crumb” (McCarthy 129). McCarthy’s precise diction creates the picture of utter destitution, of a barren landscape that has been robbed by circumstance and humanity of its life-sustaining properties. Additionally, McCarthy’s metaphoric comparison of night to “casket black” suggests that the entire world is a tomb. The boy and the man are the occupants, struggling to push open the door of the casket in order to see light, to maintain hope. Finally, in crafting this picture of hell on earth, McCarthy draws the comparison, through simile, that the world is “like a dawn before the battle” (129). The word “battle” implies that the boy and dad must fight everyday to scavenge for scarce resources and to fight off would-be attackers. Yet, more importantly, this day’s battle, like the sun rising at “dawn,” is part of a larger symbolic war in which survival represents a triumph of humanity and perseverance in a world that has become a living hell.

Ely, The Prophet

Check out an email that I just received from Ms. Hatten:

So, looks like the prophet Elijah is the harbinger of the apocalypse—the “great and terrible day of the Lord.” Oh, McCarthy. You’re so cool.

“According to the Books of Kings, Elijah raised the dead, brought fire down from the sky, and ascended into heaven in a chariot. In the Book of Malachi, Elijah's return is prophesied "before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord,"[2] making him a harbinger of the Messiah and the eschaton in various faiths that revere the Hebrew Bible.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elijah

Roehl note: Eschaton means judgement day or end of the world. I had never heard that word before.

Rhetorical Elements and Literary Strategies

Strong writers master the art of rhetoric. Literary devices are a subset of rhetoric. Strong writers are able to incorporate elements of rhetoric in their own writing, and reading and analyzing literature for elements of rhetoric is an important step on your path to strong writing.

Click here to review a brief list of rhetorical elements.

Close Reading of a Text

Goals:
Close reading can and should promote insights and questions about texts beyond the specific passage under consideration. Close reading should develop your ability to:

1) Identify specific rhetorical elements and literary strategies within a short passage.
2) Consider the effect these techniques have on a reader’s perception of tone and content.
3) Explain ideas about how the style of the entire text is connected to the content and theme of the entire text. These deep explanations are what is missing in your E's of your PIEs.

The Passage:
“He found pieces of flint or chert in a ditch but in the end it was easier to rake the pliers down the side of a rock at the bottom of which he’d made a small pile of tinder soaked in gas. Two more days. Then three. They were starving right enough. The country was looted, ransacked, ravaged. Rifled of every crumb. The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it. Like a dawn before battle. The boy’s candlecolored skin was all but translucent. With his great staring eyes he’d the look of an alien” (129).

1. Underline any word, phrase, or line that jumps out at you, even if you’re not sure why. Think about sound, diction, anything that even suggests style, whether you can put a name to what’s going on or not.
2. With a partner, see how many of your underlined words or phrases you can label. If you don’t know the actual name of the technique, or if you aren’t certain, describe the effect as best you can. Write your ideas in the margin.
3. Make a thematic connection to the underlined words or phrases. How does this stylistic element add to the text as a whole? Reflect not just on the element, but on the whole text—how are they related?

Try it again with one of the following passages:

“They scrabbled through the charred ruins of houses they would not have entered before. A corpse floating in the black water of a basement among the trash and rusting ductwork. He stood in a living room partly burned and open to the sky. The waterbuckled boards sloping away into the yard. Soggy volumes in a bookcase. He took one down and opened it and then put it back. Everything damp. Rotting. In a drawer he found a candle. No way to light it. He put it in his pocket. He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it” (130).


“When he woke again he thought the rain had stopped. But that wasnt what woke him. He’d been visited in a dream by creatures of a kind he’d never seen before. They did not speak. He thought that they’d been crouching by the side of his cot as he slept and then had skulked away on his awakening. He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he. He tried to remember the dream but he could not. All that was left was the feeling of it. He thought perhaps they’d come to warn him. Of what? That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own. Even now some part of him wished they’d never found this refuge. Some part of him always wished it to be over” (154).

For the second passage that you selected, write a paragraph in which you sum up how the style of the passage is instrumental in conveying the idea of the text as a whole.

Active Voice

Avoid weak structures like there is and it is at all costs!

There is another videotape that tells the story of Charles Darwin.
Rewrite: Another videotape tells the story of Charles Darwin.

It is important that hikers remain inside the park boundaries.
Rewrite: Hikers must remain inside the park boundaries.

Avoid weak to be verbs!

Escaping into the world of drugs, Gogol was rebellious about many rules set down by his parents. Rewrite: Escaping into the world of drugs, Gogol rebelled against many rules set down by his parents.

The subject of sentence should do the action!

The fly ball was caught by Hernando.
Hernando caught the fly ball.

Revise the following sentences into active voice:
1. The tree was hit by a car.
2. These planes are flown by experienced pilots.
3. There are five students studying Japanese.
4. The car was washed by us.