The document provides four quotes from Thoreau's "Where I Lived and What I Lived For" and Joan Didion's "Goodbye to All That" about observing and experiencing different landscapes and the city of New York. It asks the reader to choose one quote to imitate in style and voice, and then respond to questions about maintaining an authentic voice and how one's writing could connect a physical space to a reflective theme.

1. Process Assignment: Style and Voice
Please choose one of the following quotes to imitate:
At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a
house. I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live…I
walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him,
took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher
price on it- took everything but a deed of it-took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to
talk- cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it
long enough, leaving him to carry it on. – “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” page 62
Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a
house but a sedes, a seat?-better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house not
likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my
eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an
hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter
through, and see the spring come in. – “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” page 62
When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the
old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento
but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air
smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever sung and all
the songs I had ever sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me
that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. – “Goodbye to All That,”
page 225-226
I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what
New York, the idea of New York, means to those of use who came out of the West and the
South. To an Eastern child…New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people
to live. But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and
Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue
and Madison Avenue were not all places at all but abstractions…New York was no mere city.
It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and
power, the shining and perishable dream itself. – “Goodbye to All That,” page 231
Once finished, please respond to the questions that follow:
Was this task difficult? Why or why not?
Why is it important to maintain a unique and authentic voice when writing an open-form piece?
(Please expand beyond what I stated above)
How could your writing style and voice be used to communicate the connection between your
description of the physical space and the reflective theme of your essay? Consider how you see this
working in the quotes provided.
Please submit your Process Assignment as a single Word Document to the link above.