presentation for online ENGL 309

1. HOW TO…
Analyze a Model Essay in Order to Imitate It

2. For the imitative essay assignment, you’ll be writing about your
semester topic in the style of another writer. Note that style
here means not just sentence-level style, but also includes the
following things:
• The situation and the story;
• Motives of language, subject, writer, and reader;
• Deviation from convention;
• Physical and social footing;
• Tropes, schemes, and images.
(All of these concepts are in our readings for class: Vivian
Gornick’s “Situation and the Story” and Performing Prose.)

3. As a model to analyze, let’s look at Susan Orlean’s ”Lifelike,” an
essay about the 2003 World Taxidermy Championships. (Please
read this first – it’s posted on BbLearn.)

4. When you analyze essays, the first thing you want to think about
is the big picture. Vivian Gornick gives us a helpful tool for doing
this in her essay “The Situation and the Story.” While she
describes it in more and better detail, basically, it boils down to
this: the situation of an essay is its physical circumstances or basic
plot. The story is its emotional truth or meaning.
situation/story

5. The situation in Orlean’s ”Lifelike” is,
essentially, a tour through the World Taxidermy
Championships. Orlean provides insight into
the nature and history of taxidermy through
secondary research, observation, and
interviews with participants in the competition.
The story is more about the curious efforts by
people to restore life to dead things, and the
beautiful efforts of craft and attention to
nature that go into that. Ultimately, one might
argue that taxidermy is one human way of
reckoning with mortality.

6. “Motives” (defined in Performing Prose) are a somewhat tricky
concept. They often overlap in practice.
motives
• Motive of language: How does the piece use particular types of word
classes (articles, prepositional phrases, etc.) to create specific effects?
Focus on the most obvious or important of these.
• Motive of subject: How does the language of the piece reinforce or
contradict the subject matter?
• Motive of writer: How does the piece work to shape our perception of
the person writing it?
• Motive of reader: What stance does the piece take toward the reader?
What effect does this have?

7. Arguably, the most significant motives in Orlean’s
piece are those of reader and subject. Orlean takes
the stance of a tour guide leading the reader (the
urbane, intellectual readers of The New Yorker,
where the essay first appeared) into a world that is
likely foreign to them. Orlean heightens the
quirkiness of this world with her language. Read
the first paragraph out loud, for instance; it’s very
rhythmic, and practically rhymes, creating a
whimsical effect: “There were FOXes and MOOSE
and FREEZE-dried wild TURkeys; MALLards and
BUFFalo and CHIPmunks and WOLVES.” This effect
is reinforced with the unattributed (and quite
funny) snatches of dialogue recorded here.

8. Footing is described as the “stance” that the piece of writing
establishes toward the reader. Footing can refer to either the physical
space of an essay (kind of like the “situation” as Gornick describes it);
it can also refer to the social stance that the piece establishes toward
its readers; in other words, it makes certain assumptions about who
the readers are.
footing

9. In terms of physical footing, Orlean’s essay
takes on an almost cinematic quality in its
approach to the World Taxidermy
Championships. Orlean’s narrative
perspective acts like a camera; through her
descriptions, one can picture scenes of
taxidermists at dinner, or in hotel
conference rooms explaining how to mount
whiskers. This reinforces the social footing
of the essay, or Orlean’s position as an
outsider explaining this marvelously weird
world to other outsiders.

10. Orlean deviates from convention by switching pronouns in a way that
makes her appear to occupy multiple perspectives: she uses third-
person pronouns to create a distanced perspective; but she also
uses “you” (as in the “To be good at taxidermy” paragraph), allowing
the reader to occupy the position of a taxidermist. She also allows the
taxidermists to speak directly to the reader by quoting them directly,
without attributive tags or establishing context. The effect is at once
intimate and distancing, a warm but slightly ironic look at this
subculture.
deviation

11. Tropes can be thought of as “turns” in language, forcing our attention
(through language) to certain aspects of something and away from
other possible aspects. The four “master tropes” are metaphor,
metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.
The major trope operating in Orlean is an overarching one: taxidermy
serves as a metonymy for the human obsession with using
technology to recreate life.
tropes

12. Orlean frequently uses schemes of balance in this essay, including
isocolon, parallelism, and antithesis: “There were millions of eyes,
boxes and bowls of them; some as small as a lentil and some as big
as a poached egg.” She also uses a fair amount of asyndeton: “the
glassed-in miniature rain forest on the tea table, the mounted
antelope by the front door.”
schemes

13. Once you’ve analyzed the essay you plan to use as a model, the
next thing to do is to run your own semester topic through each
of these concepts of style, seeing how many ideas you can
generate. If it just doesn’t seem to be working for you, you can
always try a different essay that might lend itself better to your
semester topic.

14. For instance, say my semester topic is on microbiome science,
and I wanted to do an imitation of Orlean’s essay. I would first
begin with the situation and the story, thinking about whether
there would be anything relating to my topic that would match
the basic situation/story, motives, footing, and deviation of
“Lifelike”: namely, the touring of a reader through a weird, yet
revealing world.
And…luckily, there is! I could talk about the resurgence of the
use of “fecal transplants” (yes, poop) to help patients with C.
difficile infections and possibly ulcerative colitis. From the
outside, this could be considered a somewhat strange and
disgusting practice, but insiders see it as a lifesaver.

15. For my imitative essay on fecal transplants, I would focus on the
big-picture aspects of style in Orlean’s essay to help me generate
material before zeroing in on the sentence-level stylistic aspects
of the essay (like isocolon). For sentence-level imitation, identify
the most distinctive paragraphs and sentences in the essay
you’re imitating, and try to replicate them with your topic.