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Copywork
About This Passage
The chapter's climax is a demolition performed in secret. Watch the craft of concealment: the work is buried under sleep verbs - drowsed, snoozed, whistled a night song - and sealed by double negation, 'None of the others, not even the goose.' The two inverted sentences ('Deep in his soft bed...', 'Over in their favorite corner...') tuck each witness away before the main verbs arrive. And the object of all this labor is withheld: she weaves 'something' - the chapter ends without naming it, the author's hand over the reader's eyes.
She descended to the center of the web and there she began to cut some of her lines. She worked slowly but steadily while the other creatures drowsed. None of the others, not even the goose, noticed t...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct the chapter in three movements: the vigil rewarded (waiting, the arriving idea, the gullible lesson), the world's interruption (kitchen, swing, raspberries, the stick, the explosion), and the work begun (complaints, burial, banquet, the midnight cutting). Track what each population knows by midnight - spider, pig, rat, humans - and mark where the chapter's real climax hides.
Discussion Questions
- The swing sentence is built to ride: 'For a second you seemed to be falling to the barn floor far below, but then suddenly the rope would begin to catch you...' and on it runs, through semicolons, until the returns begin to shrink - 'then sail out again (not quite so far this time), then in again (not quite so high).' How does the sentence's own shape - its length, its punctuation, its shrinking parentheses - produce the physics of the ride? Use the words of the long sentence to explain how the prose performs what it describes.
- At supper Wilbur leaves Templeton a whole noodle instead of half, 'Then he remembered that the rat had been useful in saving Charlotte's life.' But the rat intended no rescue - his egg broke by a boy's accident, and he mourned it. Does Templeton deserve the bigger share for a good outcome he never meant? State the strongest objection to your verdict - the best case for the other side - then use the words of Wilbur's reasoning and the details of how the egg actually broke to explain why your judgment holds.
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Vocabulary
Item 1
Plain and easy - especially as solutions look once they are found.
Item 2
Without doubt; the word confidence uses when it argues.
Item 3
Serving a purpose; valuable for what it does rather than what it meant.
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Critical Thinking
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