Preview
Copywork
About This Passage
The old sheep's speech is the rhetorical engine of the chapter, and it rewards the close, Franklin-style attention copywork is built for. Watch how the sheep argues like a logician rather than a friend: a vivid threat (the zero January morning, the empty trough), a flat statement of fact, a three-word jab the reader can feel land, and then the syllogism that does the real work, joined by a semicolon and the word therefore. The closing image, seeing objects through Templeton's shrunken stomach, drives the abstract argument back into the body. Copying it trains the eye for how a writer welds reasoning to image.
You'll worry all right on a zero morning next January when Wilbur is dead and nobody comes down here with a nice pail of warm slops to pour into the trough. Wilbur's leftover food is your chief source...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Chapter 12 in order, from the roll call to the meeting's close. Then name the single moment you think turns the chapter, and explain what White does in that moment to make a selfish rat agree to help.
Discussion Questions
- When Charlotte needs Templeton's help, she expects a refusal, because in her words he 'never thinks of the other fellow.' The old sheep does not ask the rat to care about Wilbur at all; he warns Templeton about his own empty stomach next January. Why does the sheep aim at Templeton's hunger instead of his sympathy? Use the rat's own reply to the sheep to weigh whether that was the wiser way to move him.
- Charlotte plans to weave 'Terrific' into her web, but Wilbur protests that he is 'just about average for a pig.' Charlotte answers that this makes 'not a particle of difference' because 'people believe almost anything they see in print.' What does this disagreement reveal about how Charlotte and Wilbur each think Wilbur's life should be saved? Point to the words each of them uses.
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Vocabulary
Item 1
A personal quirk or habit that belongs to just one individual; the gander's reason for repeating every word three times.
Item 2
A short, catchy phrase meant to sell or promote something; Charlotte asks the animals for a new one to keep impressing the Zuckermans.
Item 3
To make someone admire or believe in something; Charlotte hopes the word 'terrific' will do this to Mr. Zuckerman.
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Critical Thinking
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