72 ❯ STEP 3. Develop Strategies for Success
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that
other Kansans call “out there.” Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside,
with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far Western than
Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men,
many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The
land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain
elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.
Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there is much to see—simply an aimless
congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad, aExcerpt from the opening of In Cold Blood
Note: You are free to choose your own selection of techniques, strategies, and devices.
Not only must you identify appropriate rhetorical strategies, etc., you must also indicate
the effect of each strategy you choose to discuss. If you only identify strategies without
discussing their effects, your essay will be incomplete.
Review terms related to elements of style and techniques and methods of analysis.Sometimes the incidental data given in the prompt, such as the title of the work, the
author, the date of publication, the genre, etc., can prove helpful.Reading and Notating the Passage
Finally, READ THE PASSAGE. Depending on your style and comfort level, choose one
of these approaches to your close reading.- A. Read quickly to get the gist of the passage.
B. Reread, using the highlighting and marginal notes approach discussed in this
chapter. - A. Read slowly, using highlighting and marginal notes.
B. Reread to confirm that you have caught the full impact of the passage.
Note: In both approaches, you MUST highlight and make marginal notes. There is no
way to avoid this. Ignore what you don’t immediately understand. It may become clear to
you after reading the passage. Practice. Practice. Concentrate on those parts of the passage
that apply to what you highlighted in the prompt.
There are many ways to read and analyze any given passage. You have to choose what
to use and which specifics to include for support.
Don’t be rattled if there is leftover material.
We’ve reproduced the passage for you below so that you can practice both the reading
and the process of deconstructing the text. Use highlighting, arrows, circles, underlining,
notes, numbers, whatever you need to make the connections clear to you.
DO THIS NOW.
Spend between 8 and 10 minutes “working the material.”
DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP. It is time well spent and is a key to the high score essay.TIP