Enlarge and post the following writing samples around the classroom. Divide the class into five or six small discussion groups to visit the pieces. Next, have each group discuss the artistic techniques they observed. Included are a few examples of sentence fragments for effect and the use of specific details for comic effect---techniques discussed in other chapters, but included here to arouse curiosity.

Painted Passages

At daybreak Billy Buck emerged from the bunkhouse and stood for a moment on the porch looking up at the sky. He was a broad, bandy-legged little man with a walrus mustache, with square hands, puffed and muscled on the palms. His eyes were a contemplative, watery gray and the hair which protruded from under his Stetson hat was spiky and weathered. (105)
          --- The Red Pony by John Steinbeck


          An old lady sat at the kitchen hearthside -- a big old lady, thin as a siding, but wide in the shoulders and so tall her head stuck up above the tidy of the rocker she was sitting in. The old lady was smoking a pipe and she kept her makings in the Dutch oven, which was built in one side of the fireplace. Every so often she’d knock her pipe out on the side of the fireplace, open up the iron door of the Dutch oven, get out her tobacco, bang the door shut, fill her pipe, open the door, bang it shut. Clack, clack, bang ... bang. (110)
          --- The Friendly Persuasion by Jessamyn West


          A baseball weighted your hand just so, and fit it. Its red stitches, its good leather and hardness like skin over bone, seemed to call forth a skill both easy and precise. On the catch---the grounder, the fly, the line drive---you could snag a baseball in your mitt, where it stayed, snap, like a mouse locked in its trap, not like some pumpkin of a softball you merely halted, with a terrible sound like a splat. You could curl your fingers around a baseball, and throw it in a straight line. When you hit it with a bat, it cracked---and your heart cracked, too, at the sound. It took a grass stain nicely, stayed round and smelled good and lived lashed in your mitt all winter, hibernating. (100)
          --- An American Childhood by Annie Dillard


          At the Miami Herald we ordinarily don't provide extensive coverage of New York City unless a major news development occurs up there, such as Sean Penn coming out of a restaurant. But lately we have become very concerned about the "Big Apple," because of a story about Miami that ran a few weeks ago in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times. Maybe you remember this story: The cover featured an upbeat photograph of suspected Miami drug dealers being handcuffed face-down in the barren dirt next to a garbage-strewn sidewalk outside a squalid shack that probably contains roaches the size of Volvo sedans. The headline asked:

CAN MIAMI SAVE ITSELF?
          For those readers too stupid to figure out the answer, there was this helpful hint:

A City Beset by Drugs and Violence
The overall impression created by the cover was: Sure Miami can save itself! And some day trained sheep will pilot the Concorde. (327)
          --- "Can New York Save Itself?" by Dave Barry


          Long before the first rays of the sun proclaimed yet another brilliant day on the Monterey Peninsula, Ted lay awake thinking about the weeks ahead. The courtroom. The defendant's table where he would sit, feeling the eyes of the spectators on him, trying to get a sense of the impact of the testimony on the jurors. The verdict: Guilty of Murder in the Second Degree. Why Second Degree? he had asked his first lawyer. "Because in New York State, First Degree is reserved for killing a peace officer. For what it's worth, it amounts to about the same, as far as sentencing goes." Life, he told himself. A life in prison. (167)
          --- Weep No More My Lady by Mary Higgins Clark