Chapter 4 - Essay Exercise 1

Analogy as a method of development is used to clarify a less familiar idea or experience by comparing it with one that is more familiar. Here are four paragraphs developed by this method. Study each carefully and then answer the questions that follow.

A. One way to view Los Angeles is as a machine. All modern cities are machines, but L. A. is more so than the others. It is a humming, smoking, ever-changing contraption, with mechanics incessantly working at it, trying to make improvements and to get the bugs out.

--Christopher Rand, Los Angeles: The Ultimate City


1			What are the terms of the analogy? (What is being compared to what?)




2			What specifically does the analogy suggest about Los Angeles and the way that it functions? (Hint: What does the word "contraption" suggest?)




3			This next analogy is strange. In it, the writer compares living language to a cowpath. B. The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims and needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay in the narrow path she helped to make, following the contour of the land, but she often profits by staying with it and she would be handicapped if she didn't know where it was and where it led. . . . --author unknown In comparing living language to a cowpath, what point is the writer trying to make?




4			What does the word "whims" suggest about language users?




5			C. The Emergency Ward of a city hospital often resembles a medieval fair. The scene is full of pageantry, a state of commotion prevails, and the atmosphere is reminiscent of a marketplace: people throng in with complaints as if they were hawking wares. Exposing painful chests or stomachs, or waving injured parts in the air, they clamor for an audience. Hoping to attract notice, they will bargain spiritedly, each one entering into an explanation of why his illness, like a piece of merchandise, is more deserving of attention than the next. --Stephen Hoffman, "The Emergency Ward," Under the Ether Dome In comparing a city hospital to a medieval fair, what central point is Hoffman making about big city emergency rooms?




6			[This final passage was written during the breakup of the former Soviet Union and its satellite Eastern Bloc nations. Specifically, the writer is describing the situation in Poland at the beginning of the 1990s.] D. "An unskilled team of surgeons is performing a complicated procedure" is how Gazeta's senior political columnist, Ernest Skalski, recently described political developments in Poland after last October's parliamentary elections. "They're not doing great, but somehow they're managing. Suddenly, in the middle of the operation, a new team shows up, insisting that it, too, has the right to try its hand. The patient is lying there cut open, his guts all splayed out, the anesthesia is wearing off, and now the two teams take to pushing and struggling among themselves all around the table. Finally, the new guys wrest control and start in, but they presently acknowledge that actually they'll only be submitting their plan of operation in some two months' time." --Lawrence Weschler, "A Reporter at Large: Poland," The New Yorker Who, literally, are the two teams of surgeons mentioned in the paragraph?




7			What point does the analogy make about the political situation in Poland at the time the writer observed it?

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