Once More To The Lake E. B White Analysis

Looking into the Past
Essayists use a variety of different modes of rhetoric to improve their writing. E. B. White, who wrote “Once More to the Lake,” and Frederick Douglass who wrote “ Learning to Read and Write” both used description, analysis, and extended definition in their essays to better them and to improve their thematic importance and similarity, which is being reminiscent, either on good or bad experiences in their past. Douglass wrote about his past as a slave and how he learned to read and write. White wrote about his past camping experience with his father and also compared that to his most recent camping trip with his son, but both these essays have something in common and that is how they use these three modes of rhetoric to

He wrote about the struggles of learning to read and write while being a slave and he also wrote about his struggles of being a conscious and educated slave. He uses description to bring the reader back into the past with him will he describes the people around him and his struggles. Douglass begins describing his mistress, his original teacher, saying “ My mistress was, as I have said, a kind and tender-hearted woman; and in the simplicity of her soul she commenced, when i first went to live with her, to treat me as she supposed one human being ought to treat another.” (Douglas 118). In this quote, Douglass is describing his first teacher and as well as his mistress. He is describing how she once used to be before she changed into a much colder women. Douglass describes her as “the tender heart became stone, and the lamb-like disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness.” (Douglass 119). Douglass is using description to describe his mistress because it gives the reader a sense of his homelife that he lived when he was a child slave. Douglass also uses description to describe to the reader how he taught himself to read and write by saying “was that of making friends with all the little white boys whom I met in the street...With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read..This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge.” (Douglass 119). In this paragraph Douglass is describing the process he went through in order to learn how to read. “The idea as to how I might learn to write was suggested to me by being in Durgin and Bailey’s ship-yard, and frequently seeing the ship carpenters, after hewing, and getting a piece of the timer ready for use, write on the timber the name of that part of the ship for which it was intended.” (Douglass 122). In this passage