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Copywork
About This Passage
Chosen because the syntax performs the chapter's quiet leap of faith. A three-word aphorism opens like a thesis, then the paired sentences beginning 'Everybody knew' slide from a fact — a sign appeared in a spider's web — to the county's conclusion — a wondrous pig — without anyone noticing the step between them. The closing sentence keeps the split alive: people come to look at Wilbur but to read Charlotte's words. Anaphora, parallel structure, and that hidden logical slip reward Franklin-style close attention.
Secrets are hard to keep. Long before Sunday came, the news spread all over the county. Everybody knew that a sign had appeared in a spider's web on the Zuckerman place. Everybody knew that the Zucker...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize this chapter from Lurvy's first look at the web to the crowded church on Sunday, keeping straight who learns about the sign and from whom. Then explain what you think E.B. White most wants the reader to notice about how each new person decides what the words mean.
Discussion Questions
- Standing at the same web, Mrs. Zuckerman says, 'It seems to me we have no ordinary spider,' while Mr. Zuckerman insists the pig is the unusual one because the web 'says so.' Why does Homer trust the woven words over Edith's reasoning? Weigh the phrases each of them uses in this scene — including his answer that 'it's just a common grey spider' — to explain why the writing wins.
- The narrator tells us Lurvy 'wasn't particularly interested in beauty' — yet it is Lurvy, not Fern or the Zuckermans, who finds the message, and his response is to set down his pail, whisper 'I'm seeing things,' and drop to his knees in prayer. Why might White give the discovery to the least poetic person on the farm? Use the scene's details about what Lurvy notices, what he sets down, and what he forgets to do to explain how his reaction shapes whether the reader believes the sign.
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Vocabulary
Item 1
Made more beautiful by small added touches. Each thin strand of the web carries dozens of tiny beads of water, as if the fog had dressed Charlotte's work for the occasion.
Item 2
The quality of being beautiful. The narrator's word for the web's pattern, paired with mystery — because on this morning the beauty is doing more than being pretty.
Item 3
Said or sounded out loud. What Lurvy does with a short prayer, down on his knees in the wet grass.
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Critical Thinking
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