TASK 1 Deconstruct the Prompt: Read and mark the following prompt. Highlight and number all verbs. Then, use your markings to create a checklist.
Part 3 Text-Analysis Response
Your Task: Closely read the text provided below and write a well-developed, text-based response of two to three paragraphs. In your response, identify a central idea in the text and analyze how the author’s use of one writing strategy (literary element or literary technique or rhetorical device) develops this central idea. Use strong and thorough evidence from the text to support your analysis. Do not simply summarize the text. You may use the margins to take notes as you read and scrap paper to plan your response.
Guidelines:
Be sure to:
• Identify a central idea in the text
• Analyze how the author’s use of one writing strategy (literary element or literary technique or rhetorical device) develops this central idea.
Examples include: characterization, conflict, denotation/connotation, metaphor, simile, irony, language use (diction), point-of-view, setting, structure, symbolism, theme, tone, etc.
• Use strong and thorough evidence from the text to support your analysis
• Organize your ideas in a cohesive and coherent manner
• Maintain a formal style of writing
• Follow the conventions of standard written English
CHECKLIST:
• Closely Read the text
• Write a well developed, 2-3 paragraph essay
• Identify the central idea
• Analyze how the author uses ONE writing strategy to develop this central idea
• Use strong and thorough text evidence to support your analysis. (3 Quotes in total)
• Do not just summarize the text
• Organize your ideas in a coherent manner (follow the graphic organizer to help your writing flow.
• Write in a formal manner. (Proper grammar, punctuation, etc.)
____________________________________________________________
TASK 2: READ AND MARK THE TEXT. Put your notes in the margin using the Comment button.
Text
Jan Zabiński and his wife Antonina managed the Warsaw Zoo, which was home to some 1,500 animals.
…For years, Polish scientists dreamt of a big zoo in the capital to rival any in Europe,
especially those in Germany, whose majestic zoos were famous worldwide. Polish children clamored for a zoo, too. Europe enjoyed a heritage of fairy tales alive with talking animals—some almost real, others deliciously bogus—to spark a child’s fantasies and gallop grown-ups to the cherished haunts of childhood. It pleased Antonina that her zoo offered an orient of fabled creatures, where book pages sprang alive and people could parley with ferocious animals. Few would ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pinecones, and she believed that meeting them at the zoo widened a visitor’s view of nature, personalized it, gave it habits and names. Here lived the wild, that fierce beautiful monster, caged and befriended.
Each morning, when zoo dawn arrived, a starling gushed a medley of stolen songs,
distant wrens cranked up a few arpeggios and cuckoos called monotonously like clocks
stuck on the hour. Suddenly the gibbons began whooping bugle calls so crazy loud that the wolves and hunting dogs started howling, the hyenas gibbering, the lions roaring, the ravens croaking, the peacocks screeching, the rhino snorting, the foxes yelping, the hippos braying. Next the gibbons shifted into duets, with the males adding soft squealing sounds between their whoops and the females bellowing streams of long notes in their “great call.” The zoo hosted several mated pairs, and gibbon couples yodel formal songs complete with overture, codas, interludes, duets, and solos. Antonina and Jan had learned to live on seasonal time, not mere chronicity. Like most humans, they did abide by clocks, but their routine was never quite routine, made up as it was of compatible realities, one attuned to animals, the other to humans. When timelines clashed, Jan returned home late, and Antonina woke in the night to help midwife an animal like a giraffe (always tricky because the mother gives birth standing up, the calf falls headfirst, and the mother doesn’t want help anyway). This brought a slated novelty to each day, and though the problems might be taxing, it imprinted her life with small welcome moments of surprise. …
On a typical summer morning, Antonina leaned on the wide flat ledge of the terrace
wall, where apricot tiles, cold enough to collect dew, dampened the sleeves of her red robe.
Not all the bellowing, wailing, braying, and rumbling around her originated outside—some issued from the subterranean bowels of the villa, others from its porch, terrace, or attic. The Zabińskis shared their home with orphaned newborn or sick animals, as well as pets, and the feeding and schooling of lodgers fell to Antonina, whose animal wards clamored to be fed. …
One journalist who visited the villa to interview Jan was surprised by two cats entering
the living room, the first with a bandaged paw and the second a bandaged tail, followed by a parrot wearing a metal neck cone, and then a limping raven with a broken wing. The villa bustled with animals, which Jan explained simply: “It’s not enough to do research from a
distance. It’s by living beside animals that you learn their behavior and psychology.” On Jan’s daily rounds of the zoo by bicycle, a large elk named Adam swayed close behind, an
inseparable companion. …
Antonina identified with animals, fascinated by how their senses tested the world. She
and Jan soon learned to slow around predators like wild cats, because close-set eyes give them pinpoint depth perception, and they tend to get excited by quick movements a leap or two away. Prey animals like horses and deer enjoy wraparound vision (to spot predators creeping up on them), but panic easily. The lame speckled eagle, tethered in their basement, was essentially a pair of binoculars with wings. The hyena pups would have spotted Antonina coming in total darkness. Other animals could sense her approach, taste her scent, hear the faintest swoosh of her robe, feel the weight of her footsteps vibrating the floorboards a whisker’s worth, even detect the motes of air she pushed aside. She envied their array of ancient, finely tuned senses; a human gifted with those ordinary talents, Westerners would call a sorcerer.
Antonina loved to slip out of her human skin for a while and spy on the world through
each animal’s eyes, and she often wrote from that outlook, in which she intuited their
concerns and know-how, including what they might be seeing, feeling, fearing, sensing,
remembering. When she entered their ken, a transmigration of sensibility occurred, and like the lynx kittens she hand-raised, she could peer up at a world of loud dangling beings:
…with legs little or large, walking in soft slippers or solid shoes, quiet or loud,
with the mild smell of fabric or the strong smell of shoe polish. The soft fabric
slippers moved quietly and gently, they didn’t hit the furniture and it was safe to
be around them … calling “Ki-chi, ki-chi,” [until] a head with fluffy blond hair
would appear and a pair of eyes behind large glass lenses would bend over.…It
didn’t take long to realize that the soft fabric slippers, the blond fluffy head,
and the high-pitched voice were all the same object. Often dabbling in such slippages of self, aligning her senses with theirs, she tended her
wards with affectionate curiosity, and something about that attunement put them at ease.
Her uncanny ability to calm unruly animals earned her the respect of both the keepers andher husband, who, though he believed science could explain it, found her gift nonetheless strange and mysterious. Jan, a devout scientist, credited Antonina with the “metaphysical waves” of a nearly shamanistic empathy when it came to animals: “She’s so sensitive, she’s almost able to read their minds.…She becomes them.…She has a precise and very special gift, a way of observing and understanding animals that’s rare, a sixth sense.…It’s been this way since she was little.”…
—Diane Ackerman
excerpted from The Zookeeper’s Wife
W. W. Norton & Company, 2007
Vocabulary:
parley — converse
arpeggios — musical notes of a chord played in succession
gibbons — small apes
chronicity — schedule
subterranean — underground
motes — dust specks
ken — understanding
transmigration — transfer
metaphysical — philosophical
shamanistic — spiritual
Task 3: IDENTIFY THE CENTRAL IDEA AND THE WRITING STRATEGY USED BY THE AUTHOR TO DEVELOP THE CENTRAL IDEA.
• What is the central idea of the text?
The central idea of the text is…
• Which writing strategy was used by the author to develop the central idea? Examples include: characterization, conflict, denotation/connotation, metaphor, simile, irony, language use (diction), point-of-view, setting, structure, symbolism, theme, tone, etc.
The writing strategy used by the author in order to develop this central idea is…