Personal Writing: Sharing Experiences and Opinions

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass
identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers
will
write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly
to save
themselves, to survive as individuals.
—Don DeLillo
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you
should be able to:
1. Explain the purpose of a personal
writing essay.
2. Recognize the different types of per-
sonal essays.
3. Identify the different components of
a personal writing assignment, such
as point of view, structure, tone, and
language usage.
4. Create personal essays that are aware
of the audience, have a strong plot,
have a clear point, use concrete
language, and properly incorporate
dialogue.
5. Generate essays with great descrip-

tions by being specific, appealing to
the senses, selecting the right details,
and utilizing comparisons.
6Personal Writing
©Deborah Harrison/Photographer’s
Choice/Getty Images
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CHAPTER 6Section 6.1 What Is Personal Writing?
As you have learned, there are four primary types of college
writing: personal, expository,
persuasive/argument, and research assignments. You are
probably familiar with personal
papers because they are frequently assigned in elementary and
high school. For instance,
you may have written a paper describing what you did on your
summer vacation, or you
may have shared your impressions of a book you read or a
movie you saw. In college,
you will occasionally be asked to write a personal reflection or
essay on a defined topic.
Although personal papers may not be the most common type of
writing assignment you
will encounter in your college classes, you will most likely have
some personal or narra-
tive writing assignments in your courses, and many of your
academic papers will be com-
bination papers in which you must take a personal position on
an issue. Perhaps you have
composed an essay about a significant person or event in your

life or a paper reflecting on
your personal goals or what a college education means to you.
Papers such as these can
be defined as personal papers. Developing a personal position
on a subject can help you
clarify ideas, practice logical skills, and exercise your reasoning
abilities.
6.1 What Is Personal Writing?
Personal writing may share a personal experience or perspec-
tive, and it can be an effective
method for offering a viewpoint on
a text or an event. Writing from the
personal perspective may also allow
a writer to write more freely than he
or she otherwise would because it is
less burdened by formal conventions
than other types of writing. Personal
writing includes opinion papers,
reflective papers, response papers,
creative writing assignments, and
combination papers.
Ingram Publishing/Thinkstock
Personal writing allows you the freedom to express your
own ideas, thoughts, and beliefs in a creative manner,
often without having to adhere to the structure or
conventions of other writing styles.
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The Purpose of Personal Writing
Personal papers are usually written to accomplish one of the
following purposes:
• Tell a story;
• Share a personal experience;
• Give a personal interpretation of an event;
• Describe a person, place, object, or event;
• Express personal feelings or opinions on a subject; or
• Entertain or provoke the audience.
When you write a personal paper, you express your own
thoughts, ideas, and opinions
about a subject. Writing in Action: Week 2 Essay: Literary
Elements illustrates questions that
could be asked for a personal paper on a film.
Writing in Action: Week 2 Essay: Literary Elements
Consider an interesting movie you have seen recently. Prepare a
three-page paper about that movie
based on the following questions:
1. Keeping in mind what you have learned in class thus far
about literary elements, what does
this movie mean to you?
2. What is this movie really about?
3. Is there a “moral to the story,” a theme to be explored, or a
comment to think about?
4. What is the point of the movie?
5. Did you find this movie meaningful for you personally? Why
or why not?
Recognizing Personal Writing Assignments
Personal papers can sometimes allow you to think through your

position on a topic and
even aid you in writing an expository, persuasive,
argumentative, or research paper. Many
of the required papers in your college courses will be
combination papers that are a blend
of personal papers and one or more of the other types of college
writing. Let us look at
some assignments that fall into the category of personal papers
or have personal writing
components, as well as some that do not.
When It Is Not Personal
If a prompt is asking you to write an analysis, interpretation,
objective account, or a
research paper, it is likely not asking you to write a personal
essay or to integrate personal
elements. A prompt will clearly indicate that it is asking you to
incorporate elements of
personal writing by asking you to discuss your feelings,
experiences, memories, impres-
sions, or perspective. Ask yourself whether the assignment in
any way is about you as a
person—if it is, then you should include personal elements, and
if it is not, then no per-
sonal elements should be used. Table 6.1 provides a list of
words in an essay prompt that
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would signal that the essay is not personal (but make sure it is
not a combination essay
and doesn’t ask you to relate something from your personal life.

See the examples given
in the sections “Opinion Papers” and “Combination Papers”).
Table 6.1: Key words in an essay prompt that signal
nonpersonal writing
Give an objective account . . .
Assess the factual circumstances . . .
Offer an interpretation . . .
Produce a reading. . .
Research the historical underpinnings of . . .
Evaluate the consequences of the newly passed legislation . . .
Argue for the significance of the text’s theme of justice . . .
Keep in mind that Table 6.1 is not a complete list; look for
terms in the writing prompt that
gesture toward objectivity or reasoned interpretation. If you are
unsure whether or not
a prompt allows for any personal elements whatsoever, ask your
instructor, but bear in
mind that the prompt will explicitly ask for this if it is what is
required of you. The follow-
ing Writing in Action box, Personal Paper Assignments,
provides examples of paper prompts
that specifically ask the writer to compose a personal paper.
Writing in Action: Personal Paper Assignments
You can recognize a personal paper assignment by key words or
phrases in the assignment that ask

you for your opinion or your views on a subject. Key words and
action verbs are underlined in the
following examples:
• Write about an experience in which you struggled with
something and were unsuccessful and
discuss what you learned from the experience.
• Explain what you think about a current scientific or social
controversy.
• Reflect on a person who had a strong impact on your life and
the ways in which he or she
influenced you.
• Imagine that you have unlimited wealth and write about what
you would do with your money
and why.
• What do you think has been the most important social or
political movement of the 20th
century?
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Opinion Papers
Opinion papers express the writer’s point of view or opinion on
a specific topic. They
may be personal papers if you are asked simply to give your
opinion on an issue and
explain your point of view. An opinion is a personal viewpoint
on a subject that may or

may not be supported with facts or evidence. However, if you
are required to state your
opinion and then argue that point of view, your paper will be a
combination of personal
and persuasive writing. This would be a hybrid paper that asks
you to incorporate both
personal reflection and logical, nonpersonal argumentation. If
you are writing this kind
of paper, you should keep the personal and argumentative
sections of the paper separate
in order to show how your personal reflections contributed to
your argument. This will
also help ensure that you include an argumentative, nonpersonal
section to your paper.
For example, an opinion assignment may ask you to write an
essay in which you discuss
whether or not you think you should buy products from a
company who gives money to
something you do not personally support.
Reflective Papers
Personal papers may also be assigned when your instructors
want you to think about
something you have read and to respond to it or discuss its
meaning for you; these assign-
ments are often called reflective papers. However, if an
assignment asks you to reflect,
discuss, or explain something, be careful. The words reflect,
discuss, and explain all have
multiple meanings.
We reflect on something when we think about it and express our
personal opinion or share
a personal story. However, the word reflect can also mean to
carefully consider something
or to explore options. Instead of voicing your own opinion, a

reflective paper assignment
may be asking you to consider an issue, to analyze a situation,
or to explore options, based
on what you have learned in the course. This type of assignment
requires an expository
paper, which we will discuss in Chapter 8. Similarly, if an
assignment asks you to discuss
or explain an issue, you must look further at the assignment to
determine whether you
are being asked to write a personal paper that discusses or
explains your own opinion
or whether you are being asked to share information you have
learned from your text or
from research. A reflective paper, for instance, may ask you to
read an article on a current
event and then to reflect on the position stated there.
Response Papers
When you are asked to respond to material you have read by
expressing your personal
opinion on a topic or to reflect on what you have read and share
its meaning for you, your
instructors are looking for a specific type of response from you.
Responses to reading,
like other personal papers, require that you state your opinion
on an issue or reflect on
an issue and state your viewpoint about it, and they are written
in first person. However,
unlike other personal papers, you do not choose the subject.
Before you write a response,
you have most likely read about or discussed a controversial
topic. A response paper usu-
ally requires you to think about the different points of view
expressed in the material you
read or discussed and to take a personal stand on the issue.
Because a response paper asks

you to begin by demonstrating that you understand the issue, it
is usually best to begin
with the more objective third person. Notice that this is very
different from the suggested
format discussed earlier for the combination personal and
research paper.
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In this type of paper, you generally begin by presenting a brief
overview of the issue
and the different viewpoints presented, to demonstrate that you
understand both the
issue itself and the controversy surrounding it. This first part of
the paper is expository
(see Chapter 8) and should therefore be written in third person.
Then, you will switch
to a first-person point of view and share your opinion of the
issue and state where you
stand on the issue. This part of the paper requires personal
writing. Finally, you must
support your point of view by stating why you believe as you do
and how you came to
adopt this perspective. Discuss what factors were most
important to you in arriving at
a conclusion about the issue.
As you can see, papers that ask you to respond to reading share
all the characteristics
of other personal papers outlined earlier in this chapter, but
they also require that you
explore and explain your opinion, which is often a way to

introduce you to expository
writing. A response paper could ask you to read two positions
on the creation of constitu-
tional amendments—one for and one against—and then to
develop a personal response
that indicates your viewpoint.
Creative Writing Assignments
The term creative writing refers to written works or artistic
expressions whose purpose
is to create images or to express thoughts or feelings. It can also
include information and
an implied or direct position. Creative writing can be
considered personal writing and
includes genres, or categories, of writing such as short stories,
novels, poetry, screenplays,
and creative nonfiction like biographies and memoirs. You may
engage in creative writ-
ing as part of your college career if you take a dedicated
creative writing course, if one
of your other courses has an assignment that involves creative
writing, or if you decide
to pursue creative writing as an extracurricular activity.
Journaling, and idea-generating
techniques like mind mapping and free-writing, covered in
Chapter 4, are also examples
of personal creative writing.
Combination Papers
A combination paper may require you to combine elements of
personal, expository, per-
suasive or argument, and research papers. For example, you may
have an assignment
that asks you to state your opinion on a controversial issue
(personal) and then to con-
duct research and find evidence both in support of and in

opposition to your viewpoint
(research). This type of assignment combines elements of
personal and research writing
in the same paper. In a combination paper such as this, you will
write in first person
when you are stating your personal opinion and then switch to
third person when you
report the information you found in your research. This would
be an appropriate format
if the assignment asks you to first convey your personal opinion
and then to lay out and
develop your reasoning afterward. The first person “I” is not
appropriate when you dis-
cuss research because research is not personal but rather an
objective interpretation. This
means that while others may have a different interpretation of
the same research, it is not
“personal” to state your interpretation—therefore, the first
person “I” is inappropriate. A
combination paper could ask you to do research about the extent
to which American citi-
zens should have the freedom of speech before it begins to
infringe on the rights of others
and then to formulate a viewpoint on this subject using the first
person.
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CHAPTER 6Section 6.2 Personal Writing Conventions
6.2 Personal Writing Conventions
Before responding to a personal writing assignment, it is
important to understand how to construct a personal paper.

Personal writing generally calls for writing conventions that
differ from those used in other types of writing, such as
argument and exposi-
tion. For example, the tone, language, and structure used in a
personal paper are often more
informal than in other paper types. The following sections will
help guide you in choosing
the proper tone, language, point of view, and structure for
writing a personal paper.
Tone and Language
Personal papers are generally written in a less formal, or even
conversational, tone, and
the use of contractions and other types of informal language is
often allowed, if it is appro-
priate to the story or the topic. Personal papers might also
include dialogue, which should
be placed in quotation marks. However, it is important to
remember that you are writing
for an academic audience and that the essay prompt may require
you to include an intro-
duction and a thesis statement that makes a claim about the
personal experience you
describe. The language in personal writing assignments should
be appropriate, and the
paper must meet the writing requirements outlined in your
course guide or syllabus. If
you are unsure of the type of language that is appropriate for a
particular writing assign-
ment, make sure that you ask your instructor.
Point of View
Because you are sharing your personal viewpoint
on a subject, a personal paper is usually written
from a first-person point of view, which means you
are able to use pronouns such as I, me, my, we, and

our. However, personal papers are often narrative
and tell a story. In your paper, you might also tell
a story about another person. In this instance, as
the narrator, you would write from a third-person
point of view and refer to the person by name or
use the pronouns he, she, or they. This creates the
effect of a more distant narrator, one who seems to
be more objective precisely because the paper does
not use the first person “I” and therefore does not
seem to be speaking from personal opinion. Your
instructor will not likely ask you to write a creative
writing piece such as a short story, but the follow-
ing fiction excerpt from Mark Twain’s The Adven-
tures of Huckleberry Finn (1895) includes several of
the key elements of a personal paper. Read Writing
in Action: Excerpt From The Adventures of Huckle-
berry Finn for an example of how Twain employs a
Pantheon/SuperStock
The chosen style of narration can have
a significant effect on the tone and
effectiveness of personal writing. Mark
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is defined by
the potentially unreliable narration of its
young and uneducated title character.
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CHAPTER 6Section 6.2 Personal Writing Conventions
first-person point of view to create a narrative from the
perspective of a young boy growing
up in the antebellum South. In the excerpt, Huck is trying to
decide if he should do what he

believes to be his duty and mail a letter reporting the
whereabouts of Jim, who has escaped
from slavery.
Writing in Action: Excerpt From The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had
ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could
pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down
and set there thinking—thinking how
good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being
lost and going to hell. And went on
thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I
see Jim before me all the time: in the
day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes
storms, and we a-floating along, talking
and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to
strike no places to harden me against him,
but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of
his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could
go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back
out of the fog; and when I come to
him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-
like times; and would always call me
honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me,
and how good he always was; and at
last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had
small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful,
and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and
the only one he’s got now; and then I
happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was
a-trembling, because I’d got to decide,
forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute,

sort of holding my breath, and then
says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.
Structure and Supporting Ideas
Personal papers are read sequentially from beginning to end,
and frequently narrate
events or circumstances in chronological order, as they would
occur logically in time.
Personal papers do not usually contain headings to divide one
section of the paper from
another (if you were writing a novel or short story, however, it
would be appropriate to
divide up your thoughts according to organized chapters or
sections). Your intent should
be to capture the reader’s attention at the very beginning of the
paper and to carry the
reader along with you, in a clear and organized way, through the
end of the paper. All
good personal papers share some common features. They have a
suitable topic articulated
over the course of several paragraphs, and they anticipate a
reader’s desire for context,
information, and development. Consider what would be
interesting to you as a reader
and what kinds of details and information you look for when
you read a piece of personal
writing. What allows you as a reader to stay engaged with
personal writing?
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CHAPTER 6Section 6.3 Narrative Writing Pattern

6.3 Narrative Writing Pattern
N
arration is storytelling from the perspective of a narrator, and
the story may be
true, false, imaginary, or a combination. A narration can be
about past, present, or
future events, and it can be short or the length of a novel—it is
important to note
that more complex narrative forms of writing frequently
combine a variety of time frames.
For the purposes of your own writing, which will usually
consist of a short assignment
of approximately two to five pages, it is ideal to narrate from
the perspective of one time
frame. The event, or plot, of the narration may come from your
own personal experience,
or it may be a hypothetical situation or an event that you
imagine. If the assignment states
that you can make up a hypothetical or imaginary situation, then
that is assumed and is
fair to do so in your writing. However, if the assignment calls
for a narrative based on
something that actually occurred, be sure to select an actual
event and stick to the facts of
that event in writing your paper.
The Purpose of Narrative
The purpose of a narrative may be simply to entertain or engage
the reader, or the story
might have a more specific purpose such as to share a
personally significant event or to
teach a lesson, or moral. When we tell a story using a narration
strategy, we attempt to

bring the subject and the events to life for readers so that they
can share in the experience
and the emotions of the experience. To accomplish this goal, we
must make sure to incor-
porate certain important elements in the narrative. Most of us
remember being told sto-
ries as children, and we love a good story that holds our
interest. We have also probably
known someone who is a poor storyteller, who rambles on or
gives too much detail, who
goes off track, or who ruins the ending. For our narration to
have impact, we must tell a
story that grabs and holds the audience’s attention, provides
important and appropriate
details, and discusses events in a clear and well-organized
sequence.
Consider the Audience
When you write narrative papers, remember to think about the
writing situation and con-
sider the purpose and the audience for your paper. You might be
interested in the topic, but
is it appropriate for the assignment you have been given and for
an academic audience?
Also consider aspects of the rhetorical context such as the
backgrounds and the attitudes of
the audience. Anticipate how the audience is likely to react to
your narrative. Will they like
or dislike what you write? How do you want them to feel when
they have read the story?
Answers to these questions can help you determine what to
write and how to write it.
Develop the Thesis
Review Chapter 5 for information on how to construct an
effective thesis. Recall that a the-

sis statement is a claim that the writer must argue and prove
over the course of an essay.
All good narrations make a point and have a clear purpose. Do
not leave readers wonder-
ing, “So what?” after they have read your paper. Make sure that
they understand the sig-
nificance of your story and the primary idea you want to share
with them. In other words,
why is the story important? If the assignment is asking you to
articulate your personal
position, then you should write a thesis that will suggest why
your position is important.
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In this case, you would also write topic sentences that link up
with the thesis statement
and claims that interpret evidence. However, if you are writing
fiction or a short narrative,
it usually will not contain a direct thesis statement, and will
likely convey significance in
the story through the articulation of a key theme or concept that
the story builds toward
and resolves to some extent. If your story has a message such as
a lesson or a moral, also
make sure that the message is clear to the reader either through
an explicit argument (in
the form of a thesis and well-argued paragraphs) or an implicit
argument (through the
careful structuring of a theme or issue).
Develop the Plot

As you learned earlier, plot is the order, or sequence, of events
that unfold in your story. It
is crucial that you organize these events so that, by the end of
the story, they make sense
to the reader and build up to a crucial moment in the narrative.
Your story should have
some creative tension, and decisions about how to organize
events often depend on how
you want to incorporate that creative tension into the story.
Creative tension is the stress and interest created when a story
has an unresolved prob-
lem or disagreement, a decision that must be made, or a
dilemma or conflict that must be
resolved. Without creative tension, a story is boring. Stories
that incorporate creative ten-
sion capture and hold our interest. You build tension when your
story includes surprising
events, when an action leads to an unexpected consequence, or
when factors complicate
an issue and must be sorted out before they can be resolved.
Include creative tension such
as this in your narrative and carefully consider when to reveal
key information and when
to hold it back. Also make certain to resolve that creative
tension by the end of your story.
It is a careful balancing act: too much creative tension could
result in undercommunica-
tion with the audience, but revealing everything will likely
make the story a bit dull.
Anticipate and Answer Possible Reader Questions
When telling a story, do not leave your readers hanging by
failing to answer important
questions they may have while they read. As you create your
narrative, anticipate what

readers will need to know and include this information in the
story. Remember what your
needs are as a reader of a narrative and try to take that into
consideration as you write. For
instance, it is likely that you appreciate the appropriate context,
background, and enough
content to understand what is happening in the narrative, so you
should assume your
readers will as well.
Use Language and Dialogue Effectively
Effective personal writing includes using specific, concrete
language that allows the audi-
ence to imagine with their senses. A writer’s use of dialogue
can enrich a personal narra-
tive or creative story.
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Concrete Language
Words can be categorized as either abstract or concrete.
Abstract words such as freedom,
peace, love, and success have no physical substance; we cannot
see, hear, touch, smell, or
taste them. Concrete words, on the other hand, represent people,
places, and things we
can see, hear, touch, smell, or taste. Concrete words such as
book, child, apple, and ice are
specific and tangible, and they represent physical objects rather
than ideas, qualities,
or concepts. They conjure up pictures in our minds of our own
experiences with these

objects. Good narration often utilizes the writing pattern of
description, discussed later
in this chapter, to ensure that readers have a clear mental
picture of the story’s setting or
scene and its characters. Try to paint pictures by using concrete
words that describe physi-
cal objects and people and help readers visualize or imagine
what you want them to see.
Effective Dialogue
In narration, dialogue is a verbal exchange between two or more
characters in a text. You
can make characters come to life and give them personalities by
incorporating dialogue in
your narration and letting them tell the story in their own
words. Writing dialogue effec-
tively takes practice. It is useful to look at examples of dialogue
in texts to see how it oper-
ates. Notice the dialogue in James McBride’s autobiographical
narrative “Shul/School”:
One afternoon I came home from school and cornered Mommy
while she
was cooking dinner. “Ma, what’s a tragic mulatto?” I asked.
Anger flashed across her face like lightning and her nose, which
tends to
redden and swell in anger, blew up like a balloon. ‘Where’d you
hear that?’
she asked.
“I read it in a book.”
“For God’s sake, you’re no tragic mul—What book is this?”
“Just a book I read.”

“Don’t read that book anymore.” She sucked her teeth. “Tragic
mulatto.
What a stupid thing to call somebody! Somebody called you
that?”
“No.”
“Don’t ever use that term.”
“Am I black or white?”
“You’re a human being,” she snapped. “Educate yourself or
you’ll be a
nobody!” (McBride, 1996/2008, p. 482)
In this excerpt from “Schul/School,” dialogue serves to directly
confront the issue of race
as it is experienced by McBride. This dialogue conveys to the
reader what the experience
may have felt like from the viewpoint of McBride as a child, not
McBride the adult who
is reflecting back on the experience. If McBride had written this
from the perspective of
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an adult narrating this experience in paragraph form, it simply
would not be as powerful.
Here, the dialogue form allows us as readers to feel as if we are
part of the moment, won-
dering how someone could be called a “mulatto,” and how that

differs from McBride’s
own sense of himself.
Maintain Clear Narrative Order
Writers use a number of different strategies to organize
information and, often, the choice
of how to organize is based on your judgment of what would be
most effective. Below
are some organizational strategies to consider as you plan your
paper and present the
material. You are not required to use one of these arrangements;
just be sure that your
paper flows well and is organized logically. As described in
Chapter 5, two of the possible
ways of organizing a narrative are chronological order and
spatial order. Events arranged in
a chronological order are organized by time, and may start with
the earliest event and go
forward in time to the present or start from the present and go
backward in time. Infor-
mation arranged according to spatial order is organized by
direction—for example, left
to right, north to south, or up to down. A third organizational
structure that has great
significance for narrative is dramatic order or structure.
The dramatic structure is common in many short stories, novels,
screenplays, and other
types of creative writing. It can also be used effectively in your
personal papers. The dra-
matic structure has five elements, which are described below:
1. the opening paragraphs, which establish the setting and
characters and intro-
duce the situation that contains the creative tension;

2. the rising action, which takes up the majority of the story and
includes the
interaction and/or dialogue between the characters, the building
of tension,
and the introduction of other elements of the story;
3. the climax or turning point, the moment in which the conflict
comes into sharp
focus and is resolved;
4. the falling action, or aftermath, where the rest of the story
falls into place; and
5. the concluding paragraphs or sections, where some of the
loose ends are wrapped
up and the story is brought to a close. Note that you do not need
to resolve
everything, and in fact trying to do so might sound reductive.
You should,
however, provide some resolution to the main concern of the
narrative.
See Writing Sample: Soccer Personal Essay for an example of
the personal soccer paper we
began in Chapters 4 and 5. Notice how each paragraph focuses
on one main idea that sup-
ports the thesis, while the author also maintains a clear
narrative order using the chrono-
logical arrangement to lead the reader from her early
experiences playing soccer to how
soccer has made her the person she is today.
con80878_06_c06.indd 120 8/26/13 1:04 PM

Writing Sample: Soccer Personal Essay
What is the most fulfilling part about playing competitive
soccer? Perhaps you guessed winning tro-
phies, adrenaline highs, or staying in great shape. But in my
experience, bonding with teammates and
learning how to be a true team player tops the list. Thinking
back on my many years as a soccer player, I
have realized how important the game of soccer has been in
developing my greatest friendships, along
with a positive attitude towards teamwork that has in turn
influenced other aspects of my life. Playing
soccer has caused me to grow as a person, influencing my
values and the outlook on life I have today.
For one thing, soccer has helped me to make friendships that
have lasted throughout the stages of
my life. I remember loving soccer from day one, even if I barely
understood the concept of the game.
When I was just 6 years old, my mother signed me up for a local
AYSO team (American Youth Soccer
Organization) that played around the corner from our church. I
had always been a spunky and ener-
getic little girl, preferring to climb trees rather than play with
Barbie dolls, but soccer brought out
something new in me. Suddenly, I had to learn the rules of the
game, and to learn how to work with
a bunch of other girls that I just met. In that first year or two, it
was all about being together with my
teammates, kicking around the small black-and-white ball,
wondering what we would eat for snack
time, and pulling up grass with our fingers. Luckily, a couple of
those girls grew into two of my best
friends. Now that we are starting our own families, we can think

back on those days and get excited
about signing up our own children for soccer one day.
Continuing to play soccer throughout my life has also taught me
a great deal about what it means to
work hard and work as a team. Unlike some of the girls from
AYSO, I kept playing soccer in middle
school and high school and beyond, and it was during these
years that soccer began to challenge me
and shape me. Many people don’t realize the incredible
commitment that is required when you play
a competitive team sport. First, there’s the fact that you practice
almost every day, which is physically
draining. When I would return home from a long day of school
and soccer practice, that’s when my
homework and chores would only just begin. But in order to be
at your peak condition and help your
team when they need you on the field, you have to find the time
and energy to handle it all. Spending
so much time with the girls on my team taught us how to
function as a unit. We knew we could count
on each other, whether it was to show up for practice on time,
help defend our goal during a game,
or grab an ice pack for a teammate’s injury. Being a team player
isn’t something that I left behind on
the high school soccer field. When our son Toby was born 3
years ago, my husband Jayden and I had
to support one another more than ever before, juggling our
family, jobs, and finances. Like soccer,
becoming a parent has been the ultimate challenge and yet so
rewarding at the same time.
Soccer has also allowed me to have a familiar path toward
fitness and wellness that I can take any
time that I begin to feel out of shape or unhealthy. Now that I’m
in my thirties and am raising my first

child, it hasn’t always been easy to find time to exercise, or to
make my health a priority. But while
I’m shorter on time than ever these days, soccer taught me to
value my dedication to physical activity
and health. So a year after Toby was born, I joined a local adult
team, partly to try to lose some of the
baby weight and get back into shape. Now, my old jeans are
finally starting to fit again, and I made
friends with another new mom whose son is the same age as
mine. When I could easily have been
overwhelmed by new responsibilities and put my health on the
back burner, my soccer background
helped me stay disciplined and focused.
(continued)
con80878_06_c06.indd 121 8/26/13 1:04 PM
CHAPTER 6Section 6.4 Descriptive Writing Pattern
6.4 Descriptive Writing Pattern
D
escription is a pattern of
writing that can be defined
as painting pictures with
words. When we describe a person,
place, object, or event, we provide
details about its physical characteris-
tics. As we discussed earlier, descrip-
tion and narration are often used
together because description helps
make the story we are narrating

clearer and more vivid.
The Purpose of Description
Effective description requires using
carefully chosen language that creates
the visual image you want readers to
have of your story’s subject. However,
you can use description in other types
of writing besides narration. For example, in a persuasive paper
(which will be discussed in
Chapter 7), you might use description to help readers
understand the seriousness of a prob-
lem before you attempt to convince them to take action to solve
that problem.
Use Specific Language
To be descriptive, use specific terms and avoid vague and
general words. Break the poor
writing habit of using vague, informal “catch all” words such as
things, stuff, and lots of.
Instead of writing “I have lots of music stuff and other things in
my room,” be specific and
name each object or write a general statement and then expand
it by specifically naming
the various objects. For instance, you might write, “I have
several musical instruments
in my room including a guitar, a saxophone, and a set of drums,
along with my radio
and portable media player.” In all forms of writing, avoid using
passive voice, forms of
Pixtal/SuperStock
Descriptive writing avoids general words in favor of the
specific. It is far more effective to describe your individual
instruments than to refer generally to your musical
equipment.

Writing Sample: Soccer Personal Essay (continued)
Overall, I would not be the person I am today without the years
I spent playing competitive soc-
cer. Not only did I learn to love the game itself, but I also
learned how to make friends, be part of
team, balance my time, and stay positive and healthy in multiple
aspects of my life. While I’m sure I
could have learned these lessons without playing soccer, I
would not have learned them to the same
degree. Those many days of sweat, late nights, singing on the
bus, and games won and lost have
stayed with me over the years. I still love soccer to this day,
and cannot wait for the time to come
when I can buy Toby his first jersey and pair of cleats.
con80878_06_c06.indd 122 8/26/13 1:04 PM
the verb “be.” For instance, if someone says, “Snacks are being
eaten,” the word “being”
is a form of the word “be” and is passive. Passive voice often
adds unnecessary words
and creates ambiguity at the sentence level: Instead, use a
descriptive verb to indicate
precisely what you mean. To take out passive voice, you could
say, “Jennifer is eating
snacks,” which directly identifies the subject of the sentence as
actively doing something.
Select Specific Details
Good description includes important details that help paint the

picture for the reader by
“filling in the blanks” in the visual image. Details help you
focus the reader’s attention on
characteristics that make people, places, objects, and events
unique and help them “come
alive” for readers. Look beyond the obvious for specific
characteristics of what you are
describing to help readers “see” it too.
Let us imagine, for example, that you are asked to describe your
office workspace. You
would probably begin with a description of the size and shape
of your desk and the objects
around the desk. But then you should look beyond the obvious
and try to find specific
characteristics of your workspace that make it unique from that
of other workspaces. Try
to elaborate on the basic description with carefully selected
details that give readers a
sense of the person who occupies that space.
For example, you might write, “The basic black-and-white décor
of the cubicle is shat-
tered by bold splashes of fire engine red, forest green, and pale
yellow. Bright red coffee
cups are strategically placed within easy reach of the computer
and hold pens, paper clips,
rubber bands, and other assorted necessities. The mugs contrast
sharply with the four
dark green sets of file folders neatly arranged, alphabetically by
topic, in stacking black
metal file holders. However, dozens of tiny yellow Post-it™
notes disrupt the sense of
organization as they litter the computer screen and desk with
reminders about everything
from meetings and project deadlines to groceries and family

birthdays.” It is precisely
these specific details and uses of descriptive language that make
these words more than
just words—they become an imagistic scene the reader can
visualize.
Use Descriptive Language
When you use description in personal writing, you seek to
involve readers in the story
by helping them see, hear, touch, smell, or taste what you are
telling them. You do this
by using language that elicits emotional responses from your
readers. Words can have
different connotations, or emotional impact. In most of your
college writing, you want
to choose words that discuss or explain issues without stirring
emotions. However, in
personal writing, the opposite is true; you want to deliberately
choose words that paint a
picture, evoke sensory experience, or that stir the reader’s
emotions.
For example, if you want to paint a negative picture of an alley
in a rundown part of town,
rather than simply stating that it “smells bad because it is
littered with junk and rotting
garbage,” you might take readers on a journey with you down
this alley by describing it
this way: “As I tripped over bent and rusted tin cans, jagged
pieces of broken glass, and
large plastic bags of unknown contents, the putrid smell of
rotting food filled my nose.
Suddenly, I found myself swatting huge, black horseflies that
swarmed around me.” Can
you visualize that alley better now?

con80878_06_c06.indd 123 8/26/13 1:04 PM
Descriptive language refers to words that are vivid, expressive,
and highly specific to
the topic you are writing on. Instead of stating that you smelled
a strong odor, you might
specifically describe it by saying that it was pungent, bitter,
sweet, or spicy. Paint a clear
picture of sensations and emotions for the reader as well. For
instance, rather than writ-
ing that you were angry, you might use the words livid,
enraged, or fuming with anger to
discuss your feelings—or better yet, you could explain a facial
expression that conveys
anger rather than simply saying you were “enraged.” Table 6.2
provides you with some
descriptive alternatives to common verbs, adjectives, and
adverbs. Use the alternative
words in this list to help make your writing more vivid.
Descriptive language tends to
express an evaluation of something. Because it expresses an
evaluation or perspective,
there is no such thing as completely objective description.
However, the best description
would be one that is carefully informed and that does not
exaggerate (“He is absolutely
always happy”) or understate (“Though he is an Honors student,
he is really only average
in his performance”). Description should aim for accuracy and
fairness and avoid exag-
geration for the purpose of effect.

Table 6.2: Alternatives to common verbs, adjectives, and
adverbs
Instead of see, write
spy
spot
observe
notice
perceive
witness
glance
detect
discern
glimpse
recognize
Instead of say or tell, write
cry
yell
shout
exclaim
whisper
scream
bellow
bark
holler
roar
shriek
Instead of ask, write

beg
query
plead
appeal
inquire
request
question
demand
implore
Instead of eat, write
munch
swallow
consume
devour
gobble
gorge
wolf
chomp
chew
gnaw
nibble
Instead of run or go, write
fly
job
flee
race
dart
dash
rush

bound
scurry
scamper
sprint
hurry
Instead of like, write
adore
admire
respect
worship
appreciate
value
treasure
cherish
regard
idolize
treasure
relish
(continued)
con80878_06_c06.indd 124 8/26/13 1:04 PM
Instead of look, write
gaze

stare
glance
glare
glimpse
peep
peek
gape
gawk
scrutinize
survey
study
Instead of take, write
grasp
capture
seize
catch
pocket
grab
pilfer
snatch
lift
pinch
steal
nab
Instead of think, write
believe
reflect

imagine
consider
contemplate
ponder
deliberate
meditate
mull over
ruminate
muse
wonder
Instead of angry, write
livid
enraged
fuming
irritated
irate
heated
annoyed
furious
incensed
outraged
infuriated
Instead of pretty, write
cute
adorable

attractive
beautiful
alluring
glamorous
handsome
lovely
charming
endearing
appealing
gorgeous
Instead of happy, write
giddy
elated
pleased
glad
joyful
cheerful
blissful
ecstatic
delighted
jovial
amused
excited
Instead of good or great, write
huge
immense
enormous

grand
outstanding
commendable
magnificent
impressive
remarkable
notable
imposing
inspiring
splendid
Instead of bad, write
evil
awful
terrible
dreadful
appalling
shocking
ghastly
horrific or horrible
deceitful
dire
wicked
poor
inferior
Instead of sad, write
glum

depressed
gloomy
miserable
heartbreaking
distressing
sorrowful
poignant
moving
disheartening
discouraging
gloomy
disappointing
adverbs (continued)
(continued)
con80878_06_c06.indd 125 8/26/13 1:04 PM
CHAPTER 6Chapter Summary
Instead of smart, write
wise
gifted
clever
intelligent
bright

brainy
sharp
quick
informed
astute
perceptive
incisive
insightful
Instead of nice, write
pleasant
kind
polite
agreeable
pleasing
lovely
amiable
friendly
likable
affable
gracious
sociable
cordial
Instead of big, write
huge
large
enormous

gigantic
giant
immense
vast
sizeable
massive
colossal
tremendous
towering
soaring
Compare the Unfamiliar to the Familiar
One useful way to help readers visualize what you are
describing is to compare it to some-
thing they might already know. For example, suppose you are
describing a flower. You
could comment on the color and the size of the flower by saying
that it is pink and tiny.
However, the color pink has many different shades, and the
word tiny has a wide range of
interpretations. So, instead you might state, “The color of the
flower was the same hue as
that of the pink candy Valentine’s Day hearts.”
When you report your observations of something; share personal
experiences; or describe
a person, place, object, or event, remember to use the elements
of effective description
to make your ideas clear and vivid to your readers. Read the
combination narration and
description essay by professional writer Anna Quindlen (2007)
found at http://www
.newsweek.com/id/32467/page/1. This essay illustrates many of

the characteristics of
effective narration and description we have discussed in this
chapter. See if you can iden-
tify the strategies she uses to paint a picture of her beloved dog.
On a separate sheet of
paper, generate a list of strategies you see operating in the
essay.
Chapter Summary
At times your discussion-post assignments may be personal
writing assignments, and
other writing assignments will be combination papers that have
one or more sections that
must be written using personal writing patterns, so it is
necessary to know how this form
of writing differs from expository, persuasive, and argument
papers.
Personal papers ask you to express your own thoughts, ideas,
and opinions about a sub-
ject. They can be written to tell a story about yourself or others;
to describe a person, place,
object, or event; or to express personal opinions on an issue.
They may be called essays,
opinion papers, reflective papers, or creative writing
assignments. Personal papers, or the
personal sections of a combination paper, have three important
characteristics:
adverbs (continued)
con80878_06_c06.indd 126 8/26/13 1:04 PM
http://www.newsweek.com/id/32467/page/1
http://www.newsweek.com/id/32467/page/1

CHAPTER 6Key Terms
1. They are generally written from a first-person point of view,
unless you are
narrating a story about another person.
2. They are logically organized and do not have headings that
interrupt the flow
of the writing.
3. They are written in a conversational tone that is appropriate
for an academic
audience and may contain dialogue.
Personal writing often uses specific writing patterns. Each of
these patterns—including
narration, description, and responses to reading—has its own
specific elements, which
you must incorporate if your personal writing is to be effective.
While narrative essays
should communicate a clear purpose such as in the case of
articulating a position, creative
writing pieces may not contain either a direct or an implied
thesis. Descriptive writing
is the use of vivid, imagistic language that incorporates the
senses, so in order to write
descriptively, one should use language that pertains to all of the
senses. This also allows
readers to visualize the scene the writer creates. Because
personal writing uses your imag-
ination or asks you to reflect on your own experiences and
viewpoints, it can be a useful
tool to help stimulate your creativity and to give you valuable
experience in expressing

your ideas in written form.
Key Terms
abstract words Words that have no physi-
cal substance; we cannot see, hear, touch,
smell, or taste them.
concrete words Words that represent
people, places, and things we can see, hear,
touch, smell, or taste; they are specific and
tangible, and represent physical objects
rather than ideas, qualities, or concepts.
combination paper An assignment that
includes elements of personal, expository,
persuasive or argument, and research
papers. For instance, one section of the
paper might be personal, while another is
persuasive.
creative tension The stress and interest
created when a story has an unresolved
problem or disagreement, a decision that
must be made, or a dilemma or conflict
that must be resolved.
creative writing Written or artistic works
whose purpose is to create images or to
express thoughts or feelings. These works
may also imply a position or argument.
description A pattern of writing that
involves providing details about the physi-
cal characteristics of a person, place, object,
or event.

descriptive language Words that are
vivid, expressive, and highly specific to the
topic you are writing on.
dialogue A verbal exchange between two
or more characters in a text.
narration Storytelling from the perspec-
tive of a narrator. The story may be true,
false, imaginary, or a combination.
nonfiction A genre of writing that
includes biographies, memoirs, and his-
torical documents.
opinion A personal viewpoint on a subject
that may or may not be supported with
facts or evidence.
opinion paper A type of essay that
explains the writer’s point of view or opin-
ion on a specific topic.
con80878_06_c06.indd 127 8/26/13 1:04 PM
CHAPTER 6Key Terms
plot The order, or sequence, of events that
unfold in a story.
reflective paper An assignment that asks
the writer think about something he or she
has read and to respond to it or discuss its
meaning for him or her.

response paper An assignment that
requires the writer to think about the
different points of view expressed in the
material being discussed and to take a
personal stand on the issue.
con80878_06_c06.indd 128 8/26/13 1:04 PM
HA3021 Corporations Law
TRIMESTER 1, 2015
Assignment 1 – Case Studies
Assessment Value: 20%
Word Length 1500- 2000 words
Date Due: Week 9 Friday by 5pm submitted via hardcopy and
through Safeassign
Question 1. (10marks)
Harry is one of three directors in Engineering Products Pty Ltd.
Harry is out for lunch one afternoon with a supplier of
engineering parts, and after a long session of talking and
drinking with the supplier, he agrees to place a very large order
with that supplier.
The other directors discover the order that Harry has made and
attempt to cancel the order. It appears the parts are
inappropriate for their business, overpriced and the supplier has
a poor record in the industry for delivering on time. According
to the company constitution Harry is not permitted to sign off
orders without the signatures of the other directors.
1. Can the Engineering Products Pty Ltd cancel the order?
Explain the viewpoint of the supplier and Engineering Products
Pty Ltd and its directors.

2. Would your answer be different if Harry was not a director
of a company but instead a partner in a partnership called
Engineering Products?
Question 2 (10 marks)
Upon what grounds can the ASIC apply to the Courts to have a
person banned from being a director and from managing a
company? In answering this question students may refer to
recent cases of banning orders against certain prominent
individuals.
2000s Archive
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
CONSIDER THE LOBSTER
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 2004
For 56 years, the Maine Lobster Festival has been drawing
crowds with the promise of sun,
fun, and fine food. One visitor would argue that the celebration
involves a whole lot more.
The enormous, pungent, and extremely well marketed Maine
Lobster Festival is held every late July in the state’s
midcoast region, meaning the western side of Penobscot Bay,
the nerve stem of Maine’s lobster industry. What’s called
the midcoast runs from Owl’s Head and Thomaston in the south
to Belfast in the north. (Actually, it might extend all
the way up to Bucksport, but we were never able to get farther
north than Belfast on Route 1, whose summer traffic is,
as you can imagine, unimaginable.) The region’s two main
communities are Camden, with its very old money and
yachty harbor and five-star restaurants and phenomenal B&Bs,
and Rockland, a serious old fishing town that hosts the

Festival every summer in historic Harbor Park, right along the
water.1
Related links
The lush life of Kobe beef: Fact or Fiction?
Investigative Report: a chicken's life, from coop to cooktop
Plus: Politics of the Plate
Consider the Lobster
http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_th..
.
1 of 11 12/30/08 4:51 PM
Tourism and lobster are the midcoast region’s two main
industries, and they’re both warm-weather enterprises, and the
Maine Lobster Festival represents less an intersection of the
industries than a deliberate collision, joyful and lucrative
and loud. The assigned subject of this article is the 56th Annual
MLF, July 30 to August 3, 2003, whose official theme
was “Lighthouses, Laughter, and Lobster.” Total paid
attendance was over 80,000, due partly to a national CNN spot
in
June during which a Senior Editor of a certain other epicurean
magazine hailed the MLF as one of the best food-themed
festivals in the world. 2003 Festival highlights: concerts by Lee
Ann Womack and Orleans, annual Maine Sea Goddess
beauty pageant, Saturday’s big parade, Sunday’s William G.
Atwood Memorial Crate Race, annual Amateur Cooking
Competition, carnival rides and midway attractions and food
booths, and the MLF’s Main Eating Tent, where
something over 25,000 pounds of fresh-caught Maine lobster is
consumed after preparation in the World’s Largest
Lobster Cooker near the grounds’ north entrance. Also available

are lobster rolls, lobster turnovers, lobster sauté, Down
East lobster salad, lobster bisque, lobster ravioli, and deep-fried
lobster dumplings. Lobster Thermidor is obtainable at a
sit-down restaurant called The Black Pearl on Harbor Park’s
northwest wharf. A large all-pine booth sponsored by the
Maine Lobster Promotion Council has free pamphlets with
recipes, eating tips, and Lobster Fun Facts. The winner of
Friday’s Amateur Cooking Competition prepares Saffron
Lobster Ramekins, the recipe for which is available for public
downloading at www.mainelobsterfestival.com. There are
lobster T-shirts and lobster bobblehead dolls and inflatable
lobster pool toys and clamp-on lobster hats with big scarlet
claws that wobble on springs. Your assigned correspondent
saw it all, accompanied by one girlfriend and both his own
parents—one of which parents was actually born and raised
in Maine, albeit in the extreme northern inland part, which is
potato country and a world away from the touristic
midcoast.2
For practical purposes, everyone knows what a lobster is. As
usual, though, there’s much more to know than most of us
care about—it’s all a matter of what your interests are.
Taxonomically speaking, a lobster is a marine crustacean of the
family Homaridae, characterized by five pairs of jointed legs,
the first pair terminating in large pincerish claws used for
subduing prey. Like many other species of benthic carnivore,
lobsters are both hunters and scavengers. They have
stalked eyes, gills on their legs, and antennae. There are dozens
of different kinds worldwide, of which the relevant
species here is the Maine lobster, Homarus americanus. The
name “lobster” comes from the Old English loppestre,
which is thought to be a corrupt form of the Latin word for
locust combined with the Old English loppe, which meant
spider.
Moreover, a crustacean is an aquatic arthropod of the class

Crustacea, which comprises crabs, shrimp, barnacles,
lobsters, and freshwater crayfish. All this is right there in the
encyclopedia. And an arthropod is an invertebrate member
of the phylum Arthropoda, which phylum covers insects,
spiders, crustaceans, and centipedes/millipedes, all of whose
main commonality, besides the absence of a centralized brain-
spine assembly, is a chitinous exoskeleton composed of
segments, to which appendages are articulated in pairs.
The point is that lobsters are basically giant sea-insects.3 Like
most arthropods, they date from the Jurassic period,
biologically so much older than mammalia that they might as
well be from another planet. And they are—particularly
in their natural brown-green state, brandishing their claws like
weapons and with thick antennae awhip—not nice to
look at. And it’s true that they are garbagemen of the sea, eaters
of dead stuff,4 although they’ll also eat some live
shellfish, certain kinds of injured fish, and sometimes each
other.
But they are themselves good eating. Or so we think now. Up
until sometime in the 1800s, though, lobster was literally
low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized.
Even in the harsh penal environment of early America,
some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more
than once a week because it was thought to be cruel
and unusual, like making people eat rats. One reason for their
low status was how plentiful lobsters were in old New
England. “Unbelievable abundance” is how one source describes
the situation, including accounts of Plymouth pilgrims
wading out and capturing all they wanted by hand, and of early
Boston’s seashore being littered with lobsters after hard
storms—these latter were treated as a smelly nuisance and
ground up for fertilizer. There is also the fact that premodern
lobster was often cooked dead and then preserved, usually
packed in salt or crude hermetic containers. Maine’s earliest

lobster industry was based around a dozen such seaside
canneries in the 1840s, from which lobster was shipped as far
away as California, in demand only because it was cheap and
high in protein, basically chewable fuel.
.
2 of 11 12/30/08 4:51 PM
Now, of course, lobster is posh, a delicacy, only a step or two
down from caviar. The meat is richer and more
substantial than most fish, its taste subtle compared to the
marine-gaminess of mussels and clams. In the U.S. pop-food
imagination, lobster is now the seafood analog to steak, with
which it’s so often twinned as Surf ’n’ Turf on the really
expensive part of the chain steak house menu.
In fact, one obvious project of the MLF, and of its
omnipresently sponsorial Maine Lobster Promotion Council, is
to
counter the idea that lobster is unusually luxe or rich or
unhealthy or expensive, suitable only for effete palates or the
occasional blow-the-diet treat. It is emphasized over and over in
presentations and pamphlets at the Festival that Maine
lobster meat has fewer calories, less cholesterol, and less
saturated fat than chicken.5 And in the Main Eating Tent, you
can get a “quarter” (industry shorthand for a 1‰-pound
lobster), a 4-ounce cup of melted butter, a bag of chips, and a
soft roll w/ butter-pat for around $12.00, which is only slightly
more expensive than supper at McDonald’s.
Be apprised, though, that the Main Eating Tent’s suppers come

in Styrofoam trays, and the soft drinks are iceless and
flat, and the coffee is convenience-store coffee in yet more
Styrofoam, and the utensils are plastic (there are none of the
special long skinny forks for pushing out the tail meat, though a
few savvy diners bring their own). Nor do they give
you near enough napkins, considering how messy lobster is to
eat, especially when you’re squeezed onto benches
alongside children of various ages and vastly different levels of
fine-motor development—not to mention the people
who’ve somehow smuggled in their own beer in enormous aisle-
blocking coolers, or who all of a sudden produce their
own plastic tablecloths and try to spread them over large
portions of tables to try to reserve them (the tables) for their
little groups. And so on. Any one example is no more than a
petty inconvenience, of course, but the MLF turns out to
be full of irksome little downers like this—see for instance the
Main Stage’s headliner shows, where it turns out that
you have to pay $20 extra for a folding chair if you want to sit
down; or the North Tent’s mad scramble for the NyQuil-
cup-size samples of finalists’ entries handed out after the
Cooking Competition; or the much-touted Maine Sea Goddess
pageant finals, which turn out to be excruciatingly long and to
consist mainly of endless thanks and tributes to local
sponsors. What the Maine Lobster Festival really is is a
midlevel county fair with a culinary hook, and in this respect
it’s not unlike Tidewater crab festivals, Midwest corn festivals,
Texas chili festivals, etc., and shares with these venues
the core paradox of all teeming commercial demotic events: It’s
not for everyone.6 Nothing against the aforementioned
euphoric Senior Editor, but I’d be surprised if she’d spent much
time here in Harbor Park, watching people slap
canal-zone mosquitoes as they eat deep-fried Twinkies and
watch Professor Paddywhack, on six-foot stilts in a raincoat
with plastic lobsters protruding from all directions on springs,
terrify their children.

Lobster is essentially a summer food. This is because we now
prefer our lobsters fresh, which means they have to be
recently caught, which for both tactical and economic reasons
takes place at depths of less than 25 fathoms. Lobsters
tend to be hungriest and most active (i.e., most trappable) at
summer water temperatures of 45–50°F. In the autumn,
some Maine lobsters migrate out into deeper water, either for
warmth or to avoid the heavy waves that pound New
England’s coast all winter. Some burrow into the bottom. They
might hibernate; nobody’s sure. Summer is also
lobsters’ molting season—specifically early- to mid-July.
Chitinous arthropods grow by molting, rather the way people
have to buy bigger clothes as they age and gain weight. Since
lobsters can live to be over 100, they can also get to be
quite large, as in 20 pounds or more—though truly senior
lobsters are rare now, because New England’s waters are so
heavily trapped.7 Anyway, hence the culinary distinction
between hard- and soft-shell lobsters, the latter sometimes
a.k.a. shedders. A soft-shell lobster is one that has recently
molted. In midcoast restaurants, the summer menu often
offers both kinds, with shedders being slightly cheaper even
though they’re easier to dismantle and the meat is
allegedly sweeter. The reason for the discount is that a molting
lobster uses a layer of seawater for insulation while its
new shell is hardening, so there’s slightly less actual meat when
you crack open a shedder, plus a redolent gout of water
that gets all over everything and can sometimes jet out
lemonlike and catch a tablemate right in the eye. If it’s winter
or
you’re buying lobster someplace far from New England, on the
other hand, you can almost bet that the lobster is a
hard-shell, which for obvious reasons travel better.
As an à la carte entrée, lobster can be baked, broiled, steamed,
grilled, sautéed, stir-fried, or microwaved. The most
common method, though, is boiling. If you’re someone who

enjoys having lobster at home, this is probably the way
you do it, since boiling is so easy. You need a large kettle w/
cover, which you fill about half full with water (the
standard advice is that you want 2.5 quarts of water per lobster).
Seawater is optimal, or you can add two tbsp salt per
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3 of 11 12/30/08 4:51 PM
quart from the tap. It also helps to know how much your
lobsters weigh. You get the water boiling, put in the lobsters
one at a time, cover the kettle, and bring it back up to a boil.
Then you bank the heat and let the kettle simmer—ten
minutes for the first pound of lobster, then three minutes for
each pound after that. (This is assuming you’ve got
hard-shell lobsters, which, again, if you don’t live between
Boston and Halifax, is probably what you’ve got. For
shedders, you’re supposed to subtract three minutes from the
total.) The reason the kettle’s lobsters turn scarlet is that
boiling somehow suppresses every pigment in their chitin but
one. If you want an easy test of whether the lobsters are
done, you try pulling on one of their antennae—if it comes out
of the head with minimal effort, you’re ready to eat.
A detail so obvious that most recipes don’t even bother to
mention it is that each lobster is supposed to be alive when
you put it in the kettle. This is part of lobster’s modern appeal:
It’s the freshest food there is. There’s no decomposition
between harvesting and eating. And not only do lobsters require
no cleaning or dressing or plucking (though the
mechanics of actually eating them are a different matter), but

they’re relatively easy for vendors to keep alive. They
come up alive in the traps, are placed in containers of seawater,
and can, so long as the water’s aerated and the animals’
claws are pegged or banded to keep them from tearing one
another up under the stresses of captivity,8 survive right up
until they’re boiled. Most of us have been in supermarkets or
restaurants that feature tanks of live lobster, from which
you can pick out your supper while it watches you point. And
part of the overall spectacle of the Maine Lobster
Festival is that you can see actual lobstermen’s vessels docking
at the wharves along the northeast grounds and
unloading freshly caught product, which is transferred by hand
or cart 100 yards to the great clear tanks stacked up
around the Festival’s cooker—which is, as mentioned, billed as
the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker and can process
over 100 lobsters at a time for the Main Eating Tent.
So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the
World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens
across the U.S.: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive
just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns:
Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What
does “all right” even mean in this context? Is it all just a
matter of individual choice?
As you may or may not know, a certain well-known group
called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals thinks
that the morality of lobster-boiling is not just a matter of
individual conscience. In fact, one of the very first things we
hear about the MLF …well, to set the scene: We’re coming in
by cab from the almost indescribably odd and rustic
Knox County Airport9 very late on the night before the Festival
opens, sharing the cab with a wealthy political
consultant who lives on Vinalhaven Island in the bay half the
year (he’s headed for the island ferry in Rockland). The
consultant and cabdriver are responding to informal journalistic

probes about how people who live in the midcoast
region actually view the MLF, as in is the Festival just a big-
dollar tourist thing or is it something local residents look
forward to attending, take genuine civic pride in, etc. The
cabdriver—who’s in his seventies, one of apparently a whole
platoon of retirees the cab company puts on to help with the
summer rush, and wears a U.S.-flag lapel pin, and drives in
what can only be called a very deliberate way—assures us that
locals do endorse and enjoy the MLF, although he
himself hasn’t gone in years, and now come to think of it no one
he and his wife know has, either. However, the
demilocal consultant’s been to recent Festivals a couple times
(one gets the impression it was at his wife’s behest), of
which his most vivid impression was that “you have to line up
for an ungodly long time to get your lobsters, and
meanwhile there are all these ex–flower children coming up and
down along the line handing out pamphlets that say the
lobsters die in terrible pain and you shouldn’t eat them.”
And it turns out that the post-hippies of the consultant’s
recollection were activists from PETA. There were no PETA
people in obvious view at the 2003 MLF,10 but they’ve been
conspicuous at many of the recent Festivals. Since at least
the mid-1990s, articles in everything from The Camden Herald
to The New York Times have described PETA urging
boycotts of the MLF, often deploying celebrity spokespeople
like Mary Tyler Moore for open letters and ads saying
stuff like “Lobsters are extraordinarily sensitive” and “To me,
eating a lobster is out of the question.” More concrete is
the oral testimony of Dick, our florid and extremely gregarious
rental-car guy, to the effect that PETA’s been around so
much in recent years that a kind of brittlely tolerant
homeostasis now obtains between the activists and the
Festival’s
locals, e.g.: “We had some incidents a couple years ago. One
lady took most of her clothes off and painted herself like a

lobster, almost got herself arrested. But for the most part
they’re let alone. [Rapid series of small ambiguous laughs,
which with Dick happens a lot.] They do their thing and we do
our thing.”
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4 of 11 12/30/08 4:51 PM
This whole interchange takes place on Route 1, 30 July, during
a four-mile, 50-minute ride from the airport11 to the
dealership to sign car-rental papers. Several irreproducible
segues down the road from the PETA anecdotes,
Dick—whose son-in-law happens to be a professional
lobsterman and one of the Main Eating Tent’s regular suppliers
—articulates what he and his family feel is the crucial
mitigating factor in the whole morality-of-boiling-lobsters-alive
issue: “There’s a part of the brain in people and animals that
lets us feel pain, and lobsters’ brains don’t have this part.”
Besides the fact that it’s incorrect in about 11 different ways,
the main reason Dick’s statement is interesting is that its
thesis is more or less echoed by the Festival’s own
pronouncement on lobsters and pain, which is part of a Test
Your
Lobster IQ quiz that appears in the 2003 MLF program courtesy
of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council: “The
nervous system of a lobster is very simple, and is in fact most
similar to the nervous system of the grasshopper. It is
decentralized with no brain. There is no cerebral cortex, which
in humans is the area of the brain that gives the
experience of pain.”

Though it sounds more sophisticated, a lot of the neurology in
this latter claim is still either false or fuzzy. The human
cerebral cortex is the brain-part that deals with higher faculties
like reason, metaphysical self-awareness, language, etc.
Pain reception is known to be part of a much older and more
primitive system of nociceptors and prostaglandins that
are managed by the brain stem and thalamus.12 On the other
hand, it is true that the cerebral cortex is involved in
what’s variously called suffering, distress, or the emotional
experience of pain—i.e., experiencing painful stimuli as
unpleasant, very unpleasant, unbearable, and so on.
Before we go any further, let’s acknowledge that the questions
of whether and how different kinds of animals feel pain,
and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain on
them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely
complex and difficult. And comparative neuroanatomy is only
part of the problem. Since pain is a totally subjective
mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or
anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles
by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a
legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core
philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics.
The fact that even the most highly evolved nonhuman
mammals can’t use language to communicate with us about their
subjective mental experience is only the first layer of
additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about
pain and morality to animals. And everything gets
progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther
and farther out from the higher-type mammals into
cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds
and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters.
The more important point here, though, is that the whole
animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also

uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for
just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of
foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling.
As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with
this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole
unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely
that many readers of gourmet wish to think hard about it, either,
or to be queried about the morality of their eating
habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the
assigned subject of this article is what it was like to
attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the
midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and
thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and
the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out
that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.
There are several reasons for this. For one thing, it’s not just
that lobsters get boiled alive, it’s that you do it
yourself—or at least it’s done specifically for you, on-site.13
As mentioned, the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, which
is highlighted as an attraction in the Festival’s program, is right
out there on the MLF’s north grounds for everyone to
see. Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival14 at which part of
the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live
cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on
the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something—there’s
no way.
The intimacy of the whole thing is maximized at home, which of
course is where most lobster gets prepared and eaten
(although note already the semiconscious euphemism
“prepared,” which in the case of lobsters really means killing
them right there in our kitchens). The basic scenario is that we
come in from the store and make our little preparations

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5 of 11 12/30/08 4:51 PM
like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the
lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they
came home in …whereupon some uncomfortable things start to
happen. However stuporous the lobster is from the trip
home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when
placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container
into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling
to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over
the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the
edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully
immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can
usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the
lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the
sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in
other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we
were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious
exception of screaming).15 A blunter way to say this is that the
lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some cooks
to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little
lightweight plastic oven timers with them into another
room and wait until the whole process is over.
There happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists agree
on for determining whether a living creature has the
capacity to suffer and so has genuine interests that it may or
may not be our moral duty to consider.16 One is how much
of the neurological hardware required for pain-experience the
animal comes equipped with—nociceptors,
prostaglandins, neuronal opioid receptors, etc. The other

criterion is whether the animal demonstrates behavior
associated with pain. And it takes a lot of intellectual
gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see struggling,
thrashing, and lid-clattering as just such pain-behavior.
According to marine zoologists, it usually takes lobsters
between 35 and 45 seconds to die in boiling water. (No source I
could find talked about how long it takes them to die in
superheated steam; one rather hopes it’s faster.)
There are, of course, other fairly common ways to kill your
lobster on-site and so achieve maximum freshness. Some
cooks’ practice is to drive a sharp heavy knife point-first into a
spot just above the midpoint between the lobster’s
eyestalks (more or less where the Third Eye is in human
foreheads). This is alleged either to kill the lobster instantly or
to render it insensate—and is said at least to eliminate the
cowardice involved in throwing a creature into boiling water
and then fleeing the room. As far as I can tell from talking to
proponents of the knife-in-the-head method, the idea is
that it’s more violent but ultimately more merciful, plus that a
willingness to exert personal agency and accept
responsibility for stabbing the lobster’s head honors the lobster
somehow and entitles one to eat it. (There’s often a
vague sort of Native American spirituality-of-the-hunt flavor to
pro-knife arguments.) But the problem with the knife
method is basic biology: Lobsters’ nervous systems operate off
not one but several ganglia, a.k.a. nerve bundles, which
are sort of wired in series and distributed all along the lobster’s
underside, from stem to stern. And disabling only the
frontal ganglion does not normally result in quick death or
unconsciousness. Another alternative is to put the lobster in
cold salt water and then very slowly bring it up to a full boil.
Cooks who advocate this method are going mostly on the
analogy to a frog, which can supposedly be kept from jumping
out of a boiling pot by heating the water incrementally.
In order to save a lot of research-summarizing, I’ll simply

assure you that the analogy between frogs and lobsters turns
out not to hold.
Ultimately, the only certain virtues of the home-lobotomy and
slow-heating methods are comparative, because there are
even worse/crueler ways people prepare lobster. Time-thrifty
cooks sometimes microwave them alive (usually after
poking several extra vent holes in the carapace, which is a
precaution most shellfish-microwavers learn about the hard
way). Live dismemberment, on the other hand, is big in Europe:
Some chefs cut the lobster in half before cooking;
others like to tear off the claws and tail and toss only these
parts in the pot.
And there’s more unhappy news respecting suffering-criterion
number one. Lobsters don’t have much in the way of
eyesight or hearing, but they do have an exquisite tactile sense,
one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs
that protrude through their carapace. “Thus,” in the words of
T.M. Prudden’s industry classic About Lobster, “it is that
although encased in what seems a solid, impenetrable armor, the
lobster can receive stimuli and impressions from
without as readily as if it possessed a soft and delicate skin.”
And lobsters do have nociceptors,17 as well as invertebrate
versions of the prostaglandins and major neurotransmitters via
which our own brains register pain.
Lobsters do not, on the other hand, appear to have the
equipment for making or absorbing natural opioids like
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6 of 11 12/30/08 4:51 PM

endorphins and enkephalins, which are what more advanced
nervous systems use to try to handle intense pain. From
this fact, though, one could conclude either that lobsters are
maybe even more vulnerable to pain, since they lack
mammalian nervous systems’ built-in analgesia, or, instead, that
the absence of natural opioids implies an absence of
the really intense pain-sensations that natural opioids are
designed to mitigate. I for one can detect a marked upswing in
mood as I contemplate this latter possibility: It could be that
their lack of endorphin/enkephalin hardware means that
lobsters’ raw subjective experience of pain is so radically
different from mammals’ that it may not even deserve the
term pain. Perhaps lobsters are more like those frontal-lobotomy
patients one reads about who report experiencing pain
in a totally different way than you and I. These patients
evidently do feel physical pain, neurologically speaking, but
don’t dislike it—though neither do they like it; it’s more that
they feel it but don’t feel anything about it—the point
being that the pain is not distressing to them or something they
want to get away from. Maybe lobsters, who are also
without frontal lobes, are detached from the neurological-
registration-of-injury-or-hazard we call pain in just the same
way. There is, after all, a difference between (1) pain as a
purely neurological event, and (2) actual suffering, which
seems crucially to involve an emotional component, an
awareness of pain as unpleasant, as something to
fear/dislike/want to avoid.
Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of
the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the
edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any
meaningful way that this is a living creature
experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful
experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the

kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it may
well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive
criterion for real suffering.18 The logic of this (preference p
suffering) relation may be easiest to see in the negative
case. If you cut certain kinds of worms in half, the halves will
often keep crawling around and going about their
vermiform business as if nothing had happened. When we
assert, based on their post-op behavior, that these worms
appear not to be suffering, what we’re really saying is that
there’s no sign that the worms know anything bad has
happened or would prefer not to have gotten cut in half.
Lobsters, however, are known to exhibit preferences.
Experiments have shown that they can detect changes of only a
degree or two in water temperature; one reason for their
complex migratory cycles (which can often cover 100-plus
miles a year) is to pursue the temperatures they like best.19
And, as mentioned, they’re bottom-dwellers and do not like
bright light: If a tank of food lobsters is out in the sunlight or a
store’s fluorescence, the lobsters will always congregate
in whatever part is darkest. Fairly solitary in the ocean, they
also clearly dislike the crowding that’s part of their
captivity in tanks, since (as also mentioned) one reason why
lobsters’ claws are banded on capture is to keep them from
attacking one another under the stress of close-quarter storage.
In any event, at the Festival, standing by the bubbling tanks
outside the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, watching the
fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled
claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble
frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult
not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if
it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings …and, again,
why does rudimentariness even enter into it? Why is a
primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or
uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by

paying
for the food it results in? I’m not trying to give you a PETA-
like screed here—at least I don’t think so. I’m trying,
rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling
questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and
community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that
if you, the Festival attendee, permit yourself to think
that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin
to take on aspects of something like a Roman circus or
medieval torture-fest.
Does that comparison seem a bit much? If so, exactly why? Or
what about this one: Is it not possible that future
generations will regard our own present agribusiness and eating
practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s
entertainments or Aztec sacrifices? My own immediate reaction
is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme—and
yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I
believe animals are less morally important than human
beings;20 and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to
myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an
obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain
kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it,
and (b) I have not succeeded in working out any sort of personal
ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible
instead of just selfishly convenient.
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7 of 11 12/30/08 4:51 PM
Given this article’s venue and my own lack of culinary

sophistication, I’m curious about whether the reader can
identify with any of these reactions and acknowledgments and
discomforts. I am also concerned not to come off as
shrill or preachy when what I really am is confused. Given the
(possible) moral status and (very possible) physical
suffering of the animals involved, what ethical convictions do
gourmets evolve that allow them not just to eat but to
savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined
enjoyment, rather than just ingestion, is the whole point of
gastronomy)? And for those gourmets who’ll have no truck with
convictions or rationales and who regard stuff like the
previous paragraph as just so much pointless navel-gazing, what
makes it feel okay, inside, to dismiss the whole issue
out of hand? That is, is their refusal to think about any of this
the product of actual thought, or is it just that they don’t
want to think about it? Do they ever think about their reluctance
to think about it? After all, isn’t being extra aware and
attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context
part of what distinguishes a real gourmet? Or is all the
gourmet’s extra attention and sensibility just supposed to be
aesthetic, gustatory?
These last couple queries, though, while sincere, obviously
involve much larger and more abstract questions about the
connections (if any) between aesthetics and morality, and these
questions lead straightaway into such deep and
treacherous waters that it’s probably best to stop the public
discussion right here. There are limits to what even
interested persons can ask of each other.
Footnotes:
1 There’s a comprehensive native apothegm: “Camden by the
sea, Rockland by the smell.”
2 N.B. All personally connected parties have made it clear from
the start that they do not want to be talked about in this

article.
3 Midcoasters’ native term for a lobster is, in fact, “bug,” as in
“Come around on Sunday and we’ll cook up some
bugs.”
4 Factoid: Lobster traps are usually baited with dead herring.
5 Of course, the common practice of dipping the lobster meat in
melted butter torpedoes all these happy fat-specs,
which none of the Council’s promotional stuff ever mentions,
any more than potato-industry PR talks about sour cream
and bacon bits.
6 In truth, there’s a great deal to be said about the differences
between working-class Rockland and the heavily populist
flavor of its Festival versus comfortable and elitist Camden with
its expensive view and shops given entirely over to
$200 sweaters and great rows of Victorian homes converted to
upscale B&Bs. And about these differences as two sides
of the great coin that is U.S. tourism. Very little of which will
be said here, except to amplify the above-mentioned
paradox and to reveal your assigned correspondent’s own
preferences. I confess that I have never understood why so
many people’s idea of a fun vacation is to don flip-flops and
sunglasses and crawl through maddening traffic to loud hot
crowded tourist venues in order to sample a “local flavor” that
is by definition ruined by the presence of tourists. This
may (as my Festival companions keep pointing out) all be a
matter of personality and hardwired taste: The fact that I
just do not like tourist venues means that I’ll never understand
their appeal and so am probably not the one to talk about
it (the supposed appeal). But, since this note will almost surely
not survive magazine-editing anyway, here goes:
As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist,

even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul
in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim,
steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-
some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has
not been that traveling around the country is broadening
or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a
salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is
radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile
to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living
somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that
my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a
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8 of 11 12/30/08 4:51 PM
sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass
tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien,
ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have,
disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by
way
of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to
experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all
noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in
lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to
confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is
painful: As a tourist, you become economically
significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead
thing.
7 Datum: In a good year, the U.S. industry produces around 80
million pounds of lobster, and Maine accounts for more

than half that total.
8 N.B. Similar reasoning underlies the practice of what’s termed
“debeaking” broiler chickens and brood hens in
modern factory farms. Maximum commercial efficiency requires
that enormous poultry populations be confined in
unnaturally close quarters, under which conditions many birds
go crazy and peck one another to death. As a purely
observational side-note, be apprised that debeaking is usually an
automated process and that the chickens receive no
anesthetic. It’s not clear to me whether most gourmet readers
know about debeaking, or about related practices like
dehorning cattle in commercial feedlots, cropping swine’s tails
in factory hog farms to keep psychotically bored
neighbors from chewing them off, and so forth. It so happens
that your assigned correspondent knew almost nothing
about standard meat-industry operations before starting work on
this article.
9 The terminal used to be somebody’s house, for example, and
the lost-luggage-reporting room was clearly once a
pantry.
10 It turned out that one Mr. William R. Rivas-Rivas, a high-
ranking PETA official out of the group’s Virginia
headquarters, was indeed there this year, albeit solo, working
the Festival’s main and side entrances on Saturday,
August 2, handing out pamphlets and adhesive stickers
emblazoned with “Being Boiled Hurts,” which is the tagline in
most of PETA’s published material about lobster. I learned that
he’d been there only later, when speaking with Mr.
Rivas-Rivas on the phone. I’m not sure how we missed seeing
him in situ at the Festival, and I can’t see much to do
except apologize for the oversight—although it’s also true that
Saturday was the day of the big MLF parade through
Rockland, which basic journalistic responsibility seemed to

require going to (and which, with all due respect, meant
that Saturday was maybe not the best day for PETA to work the
Harbor Park grounds, especially if it was going to be
just one person for one day, since a lot of diehard MLF
partisans were off-site watching the parade (which, again with
no offense intended, was in truth kind of cheesy and boring,
consisting mostly of slow homemade floats and various
midcoast people waving at one another, and with an extremely
annoying man dressed as Blackbeard ranging up and
down the length of the crowd saying “Arrr” over and over and
brandishing a plastic sword at people, etc.; plus it
rained)).
11 The short version regarding why we were back at the airport
after already arriving the previous night involves lost
luggage and a miscommunication about where and what the
local National Car Rental franchise was—Dick came out
personally to the airport and got us, out of no evident motive
but kindness. (He also talked nonstop the entire way, with
a very distinctive speaking style that can be described only as
manically laconic; the truth is that I now know more
about this man than I do about some members of my own
family.)
12 To elaborate by way of example: The common experience of
accidentally touching a hot stove and yanking your
hand back before you’re even aware that anything’s going on is
explained by the fact that many of the processes by
which we detect and avoid painful stimuli do not involve the
cortex. In the case of the hand and stove, the brain is
bypassed altogether; all the important neurochemical action
takes place in the spine.
13 Morality-wise, let’s concede that this cuts both ways.
Lobster-eating is at least not abetted by the system of corporate
factory farms that produces most beef, pork, and chicken.

Because, if nothing else, of the way they’re marketed and
.
9 of 11 12/30/08 4:51 PM
packaged for sale, we eat these latter meats without having to
consider that they were once conscious, sentient creatures
to whom horrible things were done. (N.B. PETA distributes a
certain video—the title of which is being omitted as part
of the elaborate editorial compromise by which this note
appears at all—in which you can see just about everything
meat--related you don’t want to see or think about. (N.B.2Not
that PETA’s any sort of font of unspun truth. Like many
partisans in complex moral disputes, the PETA people are -
fanatics, and a lot of their rhetoric seems simplistic and
self-righteous. Personally, though, I have to say that I found
this unnamed video both credible and deeply upsetting.))
14 Is it significant that “lobster,” “fish,” and “chicken” are our
culture’s words for both the animal and the meat,
whereas most mammals seem to require euphemisms like “beef”
and “pork” that help us separate the meat we eat from
the living creature the meat once was? Is this evidence that
some kind of deep unease about eating higher animals is
endemic enough to show up in English usage, but that the
unease diminishes as we move out of the mammalian order?
(And is “lamb”/“lamb” the counterexample that sinks the whole
theory, or are there special, biblico-historical reasons
for that equivalence?)
15 There’s a relevant populist myth about the high-pitched

whistling sound that sometimes issues from a pot of boiling
lobster. The sound is really vented steam from the layer of
seawater between the lobster’s flesh and its carapace (this is
why shedders whistle more than hard-shells), but the pop
version has it that the sound is the lobster’s rabbitlike death
scream. Lobsters communicate via pheromones in their urine
and don’t have anything close to the vocal equipment for
screaming, but the myth’s very persistent—which might, once
again, point to a low-level cultural unease about the
boiling thing.
16 “Interests” basically means strong and legitimate
preferences, which obviously require some degree of
consciousness, responsiveness to stimuli, etc. See, for instance,
the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, whose 1974
Animal Liberation is more or less the bible of the modern
animal-rights movement: “It would be nonsense to say that it
was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by
a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it
cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make
any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on the other
hand, does have an interest in not being kicked along the road,
because it will suffer if it is.”
17 This is the neurological term for special pain receptors that
are (according to Jane A. Smith and Kenneth M. Boyd’s
Lives in the Balance) “sensitive to potentially damaging
extremes of temperature, to mechanical forces, and to chemical
substances which are released when body tissues are damaged.”
18 “Preference” is maybe roughly synonymous with “interest,”
but it is a better term for our purposes because it’s less
abstractly philosophical—“preference” seems more personal,
and it’s the whole idea of a living creature’s personal
experience that’s at issue.

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