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Tr a v e l i n g
In informative/explanatory writing, the writer shares information accurately. The writer’s purpose is to increase the reader’s knowledge, to help the reader better understand a procedure or process, or to increase the reader’s understanding of a concept. Informative/explanatory writing answers questions of why or how. Writers use information from what they already know and from primary and secondary sources. They must select and use relevant examples, facts, and details from their own knowledge and from the sources provided.
Writing Prompt
As you read and re-read the texts, think about what the texts show you
about the joys and problems of traveling. According to these texts, what
effect does traveling have on people? Be sure to use evidence from the
texts to support and develop your thinking.
Writing Tips
use the "on-demand" skills of breaking the writing prompt into pieces so you know exactly how to attach the assignment do some pre-writing first set this up like a regular five paragraph essay introduce your main idea about the topic you are supposed to use the information from the background readings in your essay to help give examples that help make the points in what you say (properly cited) READ the rubric and USE the rubric! (the rubric is the very last page of the readings)
Mouse Alert
by Kary Nyquist
- (^) As soon as school was out, we left on vacation. Nothing went the way it was supposed
to. Dad backed into a tree on the way out of the driveway, pushing the bike rack through the rear window and nearly scaring my sister to death. She was cranky the rest of the trip. We had to take our other car, which is smaller and you can’t hook the bike rack up to it. Now my sister and me were crowded together so much she kept complaining about me breathing on her and taking up all her air and foot room. Plus now Dad knew a big bill would be waiting for him when we got home. It put everyone in a lovely trip starting mood.
- (^) We were supposed to go to Yellowstone Park. Well, actually, we did but just barely. I
think we hold the world’s record for the shortest time spent in the park. This was all due to my mother’s new attitude toward animals. The night before Yellowstone we stayed in a cabin on the edge of the park. It had a lot of mice, but most of them had the good sense to stay hidden in the walls. One poor furry guy had a death wish and showed himself. The whole family went into action. My father got a broom, which looked like an oversized weapon for a mouse. My mother hugged her pink flannel nightgown around her knees, jumped up on a wood chair and started shrieking, “Kill him! Kill him!” Her eyes were as big as her fists. I had never seen her quite so blood-thirsty. My sister spent the whole time dancing on the bed crying her eyes out and yelling, “Don’t kill it Dad! Don’t kill it!” It was up to Dad and me to trap it. It seemed really happy to get away from us. I thought I knew how it felt.
- (^) The next day we raced through Yellowstone and then we headed home. My mother said
she had enough of animals. For weeks afterwards, this was the big story she told everyone who asked about our vacation. You’d have thought the whole point of our trip was to go on a mouse hunt. Dad said all the money we saved by not staying at Yellowstone could go to pay for the broken car window, so for him the trip worked out perfect. As for me, I’m still planning to get back to Yellowstone one day. I want to see something bigger than a mouse.
Enjoying Your Camping Trip
must never be left open. Snakes, searching for either shade from the sun or shelter from the rain, can enter a tent. An encounter between an unwary camper and a surprised snake can prove to be fatal. Run-ins can range from unpleasant to dangerous, but the camper must realize that they are sometimes inevitable.
- (^) Perhaps the least serious camping troubles are equipment failures; these troubles often
plague families camping for the first time. They arrive at the campsite at night and haphazardly set up their nine-person tent. They then settle down for a peaceful night’s rest. Sometime during the night the family is awakened by a huge crash. The tent has fallen down. Sleepily, they awake and proceed to set up the tent in the rain. In the morning, everyone emerges from the tent, except for two. Their sleeping bag zippers have gotten caught. Finally, after fifteen minutes of struggling, they free themselves, only to realize another problem. Each family member’s sleeping bag has been touching the sides of the tent. A tent is only waterproof if the sides are not touched. The sleeping bags and clothing are all drenched. Totally disillusioned with the “vacation,” the frustrated family packs up immediately and drives home. Equipment failures may not seem very serious, but after campers encounter bad weather and annoying pests or wild animals, these failures can end any remaining hope for a peaceful vacation.
- (^) These three types of camping troubles can strike campers almost anywhere. Until some
brilliant scientist invents a weather machine to control bad weather or a kind of wildlife repellant, unlucky campers will continue to shake their fists in frustration. More than likely, equipment will continue to malfunction. Even so, camping continues to be a favorite pastime of people all across the United States. If you want camping to be a happy experience for you, learn to laugh at leaky tents, bad weather, and bugs, or you will find yourself frustrated and unhappy. Retrieved from http://www.jscc.edu/academics/programs/writing-center/resources-2/five-paragraph-essay.html on 12/14/11.
Why We Travel
By PAUL THEROUX
- (^) IN the bungling and bellicosity that constitute the back and forth of history, worsened
by natural disasters and unprovoked cruelty, humble citizens pay the highest price. To be a traveler in such circumstances can be inconvenient at best, fatal at worst. But if the traveler manages to breeze past such unpleasantness on tiny feet, he or she is able to return home to report: “I was there. I saw it all.” The traveler’s boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience—shocking though it may seem at the time—is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.
- (^) “Don’t go there,” the know-it-all, stay-at-home finger wagger says of many a distant
place. I have heard it my whole traveling life, and in almost every case it was bad advice. In my experience these maligned countries are often the most fulfilling. I am not saying they are fun. For undiluted jollification you bake in the sun at Waikiki, or eat lotuses on the Côte d’Azur. As for the recognition of hard travel as rewarding, the feeling is mainly reflective, since it is only in looking back that we see how we have benefited. At the time, of course, the experience of being a bystander to sudden political or social change can be alarming.
- (^) Throughout history the traveler has been forced to recognize the fact that leaving home
means a loss of innocence, encountering uncertainty: the wider world has typically been regarded as haunted, a place of darkness: “There Be Dragons.” Or as Othello reported, “Cannibals that each other eat, /The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads/Do grow beneath their shoulders.”
- (^) But it is the well-known world that seems particularly dire at this moment. Egypt has
been upended, and I smile at the phrase “peaceful mob” as an oxymoron; all mobs contain an element of spitefulness and personal score-settling. Tunisia before the mass demonstrations and the coup was a sunny shoreline popular with European vacationers, and the chief annoyance to the traveler was the overzealous rug dealer.
- (^) The recent disaster-in-installments in Japan of earthquake, tsunami, damaged nuclear
reactors and near-meltdown is a particular shock; Japan has long been regarded as one of the safest countries in the world. And now it seems a perilous place of inundated cities and contaminated air and undrinkable water. The earthquake itself was enough to inspire a sense of deep insecurity. And the idea that Christchurch, New Zealand, could be flattened and feel dangerous—this polite, orderly, beautiful, underpopulated, provincial, hymn-singing place—is yet another surprise.
pleasures. For one thing, the Irish of all sorts were grateful to have a listener. To be in the presence of talkers is a gift to this writer. Yes, there were checkpoints, roadblocks, bomb scares, metal detectors, pat downs. There was the occasional outrage. Ambushes by and against British soldiers were fairly common, as were other features of uprisings from Israel to Sri Lanka—the kicked-down door, the humiliated civilian, the stone- throwing children. But the prevailing quality of war is not noise or gunfire. It is suspense, something like boredom; nothing happens for long periods and then everything happens at once in indescribable confusion.
- (^) What I saw in Ulster on that trip was unforgettable. It was first of all the recognition of
the utter uselessness of the conflict and its self-destructive element. But it was also the way in which, in the worst situations, life goes on. Market day was observed even though a bomb was now and then detonated in a market square. Rituals were observed, like the one in Enniskillen in 1987 during which 11 people were killed when the I.R.A. detonated a bomb at a Remembrance Day ceremony—murdered as they were mourning their dead. Still, life continued: a cake sale, a bike race, farmers mowing their fields, the sound of a choir from a church, “Have a cup of tea?,” birds singing on the country roads where I waited for a bus, the blackening rain coming down and the exasperated good humor of humane people who were sick of it all.
- (^) It was all a revelation that has become a rich and enlightening memory. It had not been
the first time I was warned against a place. “Don’t—whatever you do—go to the Congo,” I was told when I was a teacher in Uganda in the mid- and late 1960s. But Congo was immense, and the parts I visited—Kivu in the east and Katanga in the south—were full of life in the way of beleaguered places. In the mid-1970s I was setting off from my West Berlin hotel toward the train into East Berlin, when the writer Jerzy Kosinski begged me not to go beyond the Brandenburg Gate. I might be arrested, tortured, held in solitary confinement.
- (^) “What did they do to you?” he asked when he saw me reappear that evening. I told him
I had had a bad meal, taken a walk, seen a museum and generally gotten an unedited glimpse of the grim and threadbare life of East Germany.
- (^) Not all warnings are frivolous or self-serving. In 1973, I was warned not to go to Khmer
Rouge-controlled Cambodia, and that was advice I heeded. It seemed to me foolhardy to go to a country in a state of anarchy. I wouldn’t go to present-day Somalia or Afghanistan either. Nor is Pakistan very tempting.
- (^) I traveled to Vietnam that same year, just after the majority of American troops
withdrew and about 18 months before the fall of Saigon. The country—though a government was intact—was adrift in a fatalistic limbo of whispers and guerrilla attacks. It was less a war zone than a slowly imploding region on the verge of surrender. My clearest memory was of the shattered Citadel and the muddy streets and the stinking foreshore of the Pearl River in Hue, up the coast, the terminus of the railway line. Now and then tracer fire, terror-struck people, a collapsed economy, rundown hotels and low spirits.
- (^) Thirty-three years later I returned to Vietnam on my “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star”
journey, which was a revisiting of my “Great Railway Bazaar.” I went back to the royal city of Hue, and saw that there can be life, even happiness, after war and, almost unimaginably, there can be forgiveness. Had I not seen Hue in wartime I would never had understood its achievement in a time of peace. Seven million tons of bombs had not destroyed Vietnam; they had if anything unified it. And Hanoi, which had suffered severe aerial bombardment over the many years of the war, looked to me wondrous in its postwar prosperity, with boulevards and villas, ponds and pagodas—as glorious as it had been when it had been the capital of Indochina. It is certainly one of the most successful, and loveliest, architectural restorations of any city in the world.
- (^) Just a few years ago Sri Lanka emerged from a civil war, but even as the Tamil north was
embattled and fighting a rear-guard action, there were tourists sunning themselves on the southern coast and touring the Buddhist stupas in Kandy. Now the war is over, and Sri Lanka can claim to be peaceful, except for the crowing of its government over the vanquishing of the Tamils. Tourists have returned in even greater numbers for the serenity and the small population. (Amazingly enough, almost the same number of people live in the Indian city of greater Mumbai than occupy the whole of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.)
- (^) At one point Sri Lanka was on the Could Be Your Last Trip list of the traveler Robert
Young Pelton. He has made a career of clucking about hazards, descriptions of which fill his books, notably “The World’s Most Dangerous Places.” On the one occasion when we met in the late 1990s—on a TV show taped in New Jersey—he came across as a genial if torpid Canadian, except when he was talking about the horrors of Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Colombia. I had made pleasurable trips to all three, I said. And I was compelled to point out to him that we were on the outskirts of Newark, at the time advertised by its own newspaper, The Star-Ledger, as New Jersey’s homicide capital.
Statement of Purpose and Focus and Organization 40% 0 1
purposefully focused main idea of a topic is focused, clearly stated, and strongly maintained main idea of a topic is introduced and communicated clearly for the purpose, audience, and task
The response has a clear and effective organizational structure creating unity and completeness: a variety of transitional strategies is consistently used to effectively clarify the relationships between and among ideas progression of ideas from beginning to end is logical introduction and conclusion are effective for audience and purpose appropriate sentence structure variety produces strong connections among ideas
Evidence and Elaboration 40% 0 1
The response provides thorough and convincing support/evidence for the controlling idea or main idea that includes the effective use of sources, facts, and details. The response achieves substantial depth that is specific and relevant: use of evidence from sources is smoothly integrated, cited, comprehensive, relevant, and concrete a variety of effective elaborative techniques is used
The response demonstrates strategic use of language to produce clear communication: precise language clearly and effectively expresses ideas use of academic and domain-specific vocabulary is clearly appropriate for the audience and purpose
Editing and Conventions 20% 0 1
Some errors in usage and sentence formation may be present, but no systematic pattern of errors is displayed.
Use of punctuation, capitalization, and spelling is adequate.
References and Citations When referring to evidence and information from passages, students should use paraphrasing and short quotations. To credit sources, students should use informal, in-text citations (e.g., MLA author or title tags).
