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Copywork
About This Passage
Chosen for its rhetoric of crowds. The catalog runs on relentless polysyndeton — eleven makes of car chained by 'and' — so the sentence itself fills up like the driveway, and the gleaming particulars ('gyromatic transmissions,' 'rocket engines') sell the joke of modern wonder racing to see an ancient one. Then the pilgrimage widens backward in time, buggies and buckboards rattling down from the hills, before the deadpan closer lands the chapter's irony whole: every farmer standing at that pen has seen a thousand such pigs. What they have never seen is a pig the words got to first.
The Zuckermans' driveway was full of cars and trucks from morning till night - Fords and Chevvies and Buick roadmasters and GMC pickups and Plymouths and Studebakers and Packards and De Sotos with gyr...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Give a tight summary of the chapter, then pick the single sentence or moment the whole miracle turns on. Explain why that one matters to the book's larger argument about how Wilbur's life gets saved.
Discussion Questions
- When Homer answers Edith's reasoning with 'It says so, right there in the middle of the web,' the chapter stages a collision between two ways of knowing: inference from evidence and trust in the written word. Why does the written word win this argument, and what does the chapter suggest such trust is made of? Build your case from the words and reactions in the kitchen and at the pigpen, including what happens to Edith's explanation.
- The narrator opens the chapter sounding enchanted himself — grass 'like a magic carpet,' an asparagus patch like 'a silver forest' — before any human sees the web. Why might White let the narrator's own language go wonder-struck in a chapter about a manufactured miracle? Weigh those opening images against Charlotte's workmanlike delight in her 'trick' to decide whether the chapter's voice believes in its own miracle.
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Vocabulary
Item 1
Something that resists explanation and invites awe. The narrator pairs it with loveliness in the web's pattern; the county keeps the awe but moves it to the wrong species.
Item 2
Out of the ordinary; not what one expects. Homer's whole case rests on this adjective — and when Edith presses him for what exactly is strange about the pig, he admits he doesn't really know yet. The word is a blank the county spends the chapter filling.
Item 3
Came to someone — or was sent upon them — as if from above. The minister's stately passive, a community 'visited with a wondrous animal,' quietly converts a barnyard prank into a heaven-sent event.
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Critical Thinking
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