Reading: Process Analysis essays by “Nobody in Particular”

Bottom’s Up

“Beer here! Get your ice-cold beer here!” You probably heard that shouted the last time you were at the ball park. At a ball game, a party, a barbecue, or a fishing trip, people enjoy an ice-cold beer. Throughout the world, people drink 22 billion gallons of beer annually. Americans alone consume 24 gallons of beer per person every year. Few people know how beer is produced, however. The basic brewing process has five steps.

The first step is mashing. Cereal grains, usually barley and hops, are mixed with water. The mixture, called “wort,” is heated to about 150 degrees and stirred constantly. When the mixture is allowed to settle, the solids settle and the liquid passes through it.

Then comes boiling and hopping. During these steps, dried flowers from the hop vine are added, about three quarters of a pound of hops for every 31 gallons of wort. The hops prevent spoiling and give the beverage flavor. The mixture is boiled for about two hours.

Next comes the fermenting stage in the process. The brewer uses yeast to cause fermenting, adding about one pound per 31 gallons of wort. Alcohol and carbon dioxide form during fermentation. The mixture is kept at 38 degrees Fahrenheit and completes fermentation in about a week or two.

The final step is called “finishing.” Here, the brewer compresses and stores carbon dioxide from the beer wort. Stored in huge metal vats for three to six weeks, the beer continues to settle and clear. Then the beer is carbonated and passes through a pressure filter to be packaged.

Perhaps the next time you have a beer, you’ll appreciate it more. Even if you’re not a beer drinker, you’ll realize the work that went into producing one of the world’s best-selling products.

Post below your responses to this essay for extra credit towards your FD2 packet.  Note that not all answers will be credited.  You can be awarded anywhere from 0 to 10 points per response. 

1. Why did I title this essay as written by “Nobody in Particular” when it must have been written by somebody?

2. What makes this essay so bland?  What is the key component mentioned in class that is missing from this essay?

3. How could I make this essay a better one?

4. What are some features of this essay that are actually really good?

 

Reading: Process Analysis essays by Richard Selzer

An accomplished surgeon and a professor of surgery, Richard Selzer is also one of America’s most celebrated essayists. “When I put down the scalpel and picked up a pen,” he once wrote, “I reveled in letting go.”

The following paragraphs from “The Knife,” an essay in Selzer’s first collection, Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery, vividly describe the process of “the laying open of the body of a human being.”

from “The Knife”*

by Richard Selzer

A stillness settles in my heart and is carried to my hand. It is the quietude of resolve layered over fear. And it is this resolve that lowers us, my knife and me, deeper and deeper into the person beneath. It is an entry into the body that is nothing like a caress; still, it is among the gentlest of acts. Then stroke and stroke again, and we are joined by other instruments, hemostats and forceps, until the wound blooms with strange flowers whose looped handles fall to the sides in steely array.

There is sound, the tight click of clamps fixing teeth into severed blood vessels, the snuffle and gargle of the suction machine clearing the field of blood for the next stroke, the litany of monosyllables with which one prays his way down and in: clamp, sponge, suture, tie, cut. And there is color. The green of the cloth, the white of the sponges, the red and yellow of the body. Beneath the fat lies the fascia, the tough fibrous sheet encasing the muscles. It must be sliced and the red beef of the muscles separated. Now there are retractors to hold apart the wound. Hands move together, part, weave. We are fully engaged, like children absorbed in a game or the craftsmen of some place like Damascus.

Deeper still. The peritoneum, pink and gleaming and membranous, bulges into the wound. It is grasped with forceps, and opened. For the first time we can see into the cavity of the abdomen. Such a primitive place. One expects to find drawings of buffalo on the walls. The sense of trespassing is keener now, heightened by the world’s light illuminating the organs, their secret colors revealed–maroon and salmon and yellow. The vista is sweetly vulnerable at this moment, a kind of welcoming. An arc of the liver shines high and on the right, like a dark sun. It laps over the pink sweep of the stomach, from whose lower border the gauzy omentum is draped, and through which veil one sees, sinuous, slow as just-fed snakes, the indolent coils of the intestine.

You turn aside to wash your gloves. It is a ritual cleansing. One enters this temple doubly washed. Here is man as microcosm, representing in all his parts the earth, perhaps the universe.

* “The Knife,” by Richard Selzer, appears in the essay collection Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery, originally published by Simon & Schuster in 1976, reprinted by Harcourt in 1996.

Post below your responses to this essay for extra credit towards your FD2 packet.  Note that not all answers will be credited.  You can be awarded anywhere from 0 to 10 points per response. 

1. What makes this essay a good example of a process analysis essay – particularly regarding what I have lectured in class about needing to be original, personal and evocative?  What was the most original aspect of this essay for you?
   

2. Selzer uses beautifully metaphoric language for such a gruesome process.  Why do you think he does this?
   

3. What are some clear statements that are obvious “instructive how to” sentences?  Be sure to copy them down accurately.
   

4. What are some additional features of this essay that caught your attention?  Why did you like this essay?

Reading: Process Analysis essays by Wendell Berry

One of America’s foremost essayists and social critics, Wendell Berry is a farmer in northeastern Kentucky and an agrarian writer in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Edward Abbey. In a recent interview with Thomas P. Healy (in Counterpunch, April 15/16, 2006), Berry described the “very serious cultural and economic failure” of the industrial world:

We’re living at the expense of basic or primary workers, primary producers. We’re living off the backs of small farmers and Central American and Mexican migrants. And all the while we’re congratulating ourselves for getting over slavery. And that hasn’t happened.

In the following excerpt from his essay “A Few Words for Motherhood,” Berry describes the process of assisting at the birth of a calf–an experience that leaves the author “feeling instructed and awed and pleased.” Berry’s paratactic style, characterized by straightforward diction, is deceptively simple.

from A Few Words for Motherhood*

by Wendell Berry

My wife and son and I find the heifer in a far corner of the field. In maybe two hours of labor she has managed to give birth to one small foot. We know how it has been with her. Time and again she has lain down and heaved at her burden, and got up and turned and smelled the ground. She is a heifer–how does she know that something is supposed to be there?

It takes some doing even for the three of us to get her into the barn. Her orders are to be alone, and she does all in her power to obey. But finally we shut the door behind her and get her into a stall. She isn’t wild; once she is confined it isn’t even necessary to tie her. I wash in a bucket of icy water and soap my right hand and forearm. She is quiet now. And so are we humans–worried, and excited, too, for if there is a chance for failure here, there is also a chance for success.

I loop a bale string onto the calf’s exposed foot, knot the string short around a stick which my son then holds. I press my hand gently into the birth canal until I find the second foot and then, a little further on, a nose. I loop a string around the second foot, fasten on another stick for a handhold. And then we pull. The heifer stands and pulls against us for a few seconds, then gives up and goes down. We brace ourselves the best we can into our work, pulling as the heifer pushes. Finally the head comes, and then, more easily, the rest.

We clear the calf’s nose, help him to breathe, and then, because the heifer has not yet stood up, we lay him on the bedding in front of her. And what always seems to me the miracle of it begins. She has never calved before. If she ever saw another cow calve, she paid little attention. She has, as we humans say, no education and no experience. And yet she recognizes the calf as her own, and knows what to do for it. Some heifers don’t, but most do, as this one does. Even before she gets up, she begins to lick it about the nose and face with loud, vigorous swipes of her tongue. And all the while she utters a kind of moan, meant to comfort, encourage, and reassure–or so I understand it.

Selected Works of Nonfiction by Wendell Berry

• A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (1971, reprinted by Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003)
• Recollected Essays, 1965-1980 (North Point Press, 1981)
• The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (North Point Press, 1982)
• The Art Of The Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays Of Wendell Berry, Norman Wirzba (Counterpoint Press, 2002)
• The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays (2005)

* “A Few Words for Motherhood” appears in the collection The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural, published by North Point Press, 1982.

 

Post below your responses to this essay for extra credit towards your FD2 packet.  Note that not all answers will be credited.  You can be awarded anywhere from 0 to 10 points per response. 

1. How is Berry’s essay NOT what I want you to write for this class?  (In other words, how does his essay deviate from my “formula”?)
   

2. Why would I have chosen this essay as a good example of a process analysis essay then?
   

3. What are some clear statements that are obvious “instructive how to” sentences?  Be sure to copy them down accurately.
   

4. What is a paratactic style and why should you NOT use it in your essays?
   

    

    

Reading: Process Analysis essays by Joseph Heller

Since the publication of Catch-22 in 1961, the title of Joseph Heller’s first novel has become a byword for the absurdity of war and, by extension, any senseless or illogical circumstance. In these two paragraphs from the opening chapter, we learn how Yossarian, a U.S. Air Force pilot in World War II, fights off boredom in a military hospital. Consider how the steps involved in his private “war” on language (a kind of process analysis) introduce the novel’s theme of the absurd response to an absurd predicament.

from Catch-22*

by Joseph Heller

All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation “Dear Mary” from a letter, and at the bottom he wrote, “I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.” A. T. Tappman was the group chaplain’s name.

When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters, he began attacking the names and addresses on the envelopes, obliterating whole homes and streets, annihilating entire metropolises with careless flicks of his wrist as though he were God. Catch-22 required that each censored letter bear the censoring officer’s name. Most letters he didn’t read at all. On those he didn’t read at all he wrote his own name. On those he did read he wrote, “Washington Irving.” When that grew monotonous he wrote, “Irving Washington.” Censoring the envelopes had serious repercussions, produced a ripple of anxiety on some ethereal military echelon that floated a C.I.D. man back into the ward posing as a patient. They all knew he was a C.I.D. man because he kept inquiring about an officer named Irving or Washington and because after his first day there he wouldn’t censor letters. He found them too monotonous.

Selected Works by Joseph Heller

• Catch-22, novel (1961)
• We Bombed in New Haven, play (1967)
• Dirty Dingus Magee, screenplay (1970)
• Something Happened, novel (1974)
• Good as Gold, novel (1979)
• No Laughing Matter, autobiography (1986)
• Closing Time, novel (1994)

* Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 was first published by Simon & Schuster in 1961. It is currently available in a Simon & Schuster Classic edition.

Post below your responses to this essay for extra credit towards your FD2 packet.  Note that not all answers will be credited.  You can be awarded anywhere from 0 to 10 points per response. 

1. How is this process analysis example different from Hemingway’s essay?  How does 2nd-person perspective differ from 3rd-person perspective writing?  Which do you prefer?  In your opinion, which works better as a process analysis writing style?
   

2. What exactly is Heller saying here?  Is he being serious?  What is he actually criticizing?
   

3. What are some clear statements that are obvious “instructive how to” sentences?  Be sure to copy them down accurately.
   

4. What are some additional features of this essay that caught your attention?  Why did you like this essay?

Reading: Process Analysis essays by Ernest Hemingway

Before publishing his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926,Ernest Hemingway worked as a reporter for the Toronto Daily Star. Though he thought it was unflattering to see his “newspaper stuff” compared to his fiction, the line between Hemingway’s factual and fictional writings was often blurred. As William White notes in his introduction to By-line: Ernest Hemingway (1967), he regularly “took pieces he first filed with magazines and newspapers and published them with virtually no change in his own books as short stories.”

Hemingway’s famously economical style is already on display in this article from June 1920, an instructional piece (developed byprocess analysis) on setting up camp and cooking outdoors.

Camping Out

by Ernest Hemingway

Thousands of people will go into the bush this summer to cut the high cost of living. A man who gets his two weeks’ salary while he is on vacation should be able to put those two weeks in fishing and camping and be able to save one week’s salary clear. He ought to be able to sleep comfortably every night, to eat well every day and to return to the city rested and in good condition.

But if he goes into the woods with a frying pan, an ignorance of black flies and mosquitoes, and a great and abiding lack of knowledge about cookery, the chances are that his return will be very different. He will come back with enough mosquito bites to make the back of his neck look like a relief map of the Caucasus. His digestion will be wrecked after a valiant battle to assimilate half-cooked or charred grub. And he won’t have had a decent night’s sleep while he has been gone.

He will solemnly raise his right hand and inform you that he has joined the grand army of never-agains. The call of the wild may be all right, but it’s a dog’s life. He’s heard the call of the tame with both ears. Waiter, bring him an order of milk toast.

In the first place he overlooked the insects. Black flies, no-see-ums, deer flies, gnats and mosquitoes were instituted by the devil to force people to live in cities where he could get at them better. If it weren’t for them everybody would live in the bush and he would be out of work. It was a rather successful invention.

But there are lots of dopes that will counteract the pests. The simplest perhaps is oil of citronella. Two bits’ worth of this purchased at any pharmacist’s will be enough to last for two weeks in the worst fly and mosquito-ridden country.

Rub a little on the back of your neck, your forehead and your wrists before you start fishing, and the blacks and skeeters will shun you. The odor of citronella is not offensive to people. It smells like gun oil. But the bugs do hate it.

Oil of pennyroyal and eucalyptol are also much hated by mosquitoes, and with citronella they form the basis for many proprietary preparations. But it is cheaper and better to buy the straight citronella. Put a little on the mosquito netting that covers the front of your pup tent or canoe tent at night, and you won’t be bothered.

To be really rested and get any benefit out of a vacation a man must get a good night’s sleep every night. The first requisite for this is to have plenty of cover. It is twice as cold as you expect it will be in the bush four nights out of five, and a good plan is to take just double the bedding that you think you will need. An old quilt that you can wrap up in is as warm as two blankets.

Nearly all outdoor writers rhapsodize over the browse bed. It is all right for the man who knows how to make one and has plenty of time. But in a succession of one-night camps on a canoe trip all you need is level ground for your tent floor and you will sleep all right if you have plenty of covers under you. Take twice as much cover as you think that you will need, and then put two-thirds of it under you. You will sleep warm and get your rest.

When it is clear weather you don’t need to pitch your tent if you are only stopping for the night. Drive four stakes at the head of your made-up bed and drape your mosquito bar over that, then you can sleep like a log and laugh at the mosquitoes.

Outside of insects and bum sleeping the rock that wrecks most camping trips is cooking. The average tyro’s idea of cooking is to fry everything and fry it good and plenty. Now, a frying pan is a most necessary thing to any trip, but you also need the old stew kettle and the folding reflector baker.

A pan of fried trout can’t be bettered and they don’t cost any more than ever. But there is a good and bad way of frying them.

The beginner puts his trout and his bacon in and over a brightly burning fire; the bacon curls up and dries into a dry tasteless cinder and the trout is burned outside while it is still raw inside. He eats them and it is all right if he is only out for the day and going home to a good meal at night. But if he is going to face more trout and bacon the next morning and other equally well-cooked dishes for the remainder of two weeks he is on the pathway to nervous dyspepsia.

The proper way is to cook over coals. Have several cans of Crisco or Cotosuet or one of the vegetable shortenings along that are as good as lard and excellent for all kinds of shortening. Put the bacon in and when it is about half cooked lay the trout in the hot grease, dipping them in corn meal first. Then put the bacon on top of the trout and it will baste them as it slowly cooks.

The coffee can be boiling at the same time and in a smaller skillet pancakes being made that are satisfying the other campers while they are waiting for the trout.

With the prepared pancake flours you take a cupful of pancake flour and add a cup of water. Mix the water and flour and as soon as the lumps are out it is ready for cooking. Have the skillet hot and keep it well greased. Drop the batter in and as soon as it is done on one side loosen it in the skillet and flip it over. Apple butter, syrup or cinnamon and sugar go well with the cakes.

While the crowd have taken the edge from their appetites with flapjacks the trout have been cooked and they and the bacon are ready to serve. The trout are crisp outside and firm and pink inside and the bacon is well done–but not too done. If there is anything better than that combination the writer has yet to taste it in a lifetime devoted largely and studiously to eating.

The stew kettle will cook your dried apricots when they have resumed their predried plumpness after a night of soaking, it will serve to concoct a mulligan in, and it will cook macaroni. When you are not using it, it should be boiling water for the dishes.

In the baker, mere man comes into his own, for he can make a pie that to his bush appetite will have it all over the product that mother used to make, like a tent. Men have always believed that there was something mysterious and difficult about making a pie. Here is a great secret. There is nothing to it. We’ve been kidded for years. Any man of average office intelligence can make at least as good a pie as his wife.

All there is to a pie is a cup and a half of flour, one-half teaspoonful of salt, one-half cup of lard and cold water. That will make pie crust that will bring tears of joy into your camping partner’s eyes.

Mix the salt with the flour, work the lard into the flour, make it up into a good workmanlike dough with cold water. Spread some flour on the back of a box or something flat, and pat the dough around a while. Then roll it out with whatever kind of round bottle you prefer. Put a little more lard on the surface of the sheet of dough and then slosh a little flour on and roll it up and then roll it out again with the bottle.

Cut out a piece of the rolled out dough big enough to line a pie tin. I like the kind with holes in the bottom. Then put in your dried apples that have soaked all night and been sweetened, or your apricots, or your blueberries, and then take another sheet of the dough and drape it gracefully over the top, soldering it down at the edges with your fingers. Cut a couple of slits in the top dough sheet and prick it a few times with a fork in an artistic manner.

Put it in the baker with a good slow fire for forty-five minutes and then take it out and if your pals are Frenchmen they will kiss you. The penalty for knowing how to cook is that the others will make you do all the cooking.

It is all right to talk about roughing it in the woods. But the real woodsman is the man who can be really comfortable in the bush.

“Camping Out” by Ernest Hemingway was originally published in the Toronto Daily Star on June 26, 1920.

 

Post below your responses to this essay for extra credit towards your FD2 packet.  Note that not all answers will be credited.  You can be awarded anywhere from 0 to 10 points per response. 

1. What makes this essay a good example of a process analysis essay? 
   

2. What makes this essay distinctively Hemingway’s BEST WAY to go camping?  Which specific sentences make this essay unique to him?
   

3. What are some clear statements that are obvious “instructive how to” sentences?  Be sure to copy them down accurately.
   

4. What are some additional features of this essay that caught your attention?  Why did you like this essay?