Write Outside: Knowing Fauna Activity and Writing Prompt

I looked into my garden. I knelt between the plants. I held my cupped hand to my eye to focus my gaze on its smallest details. I saw snails, grasshoppers, ladybugs, caterpillars, and bees. I watched them eat and rest, acknowledge one another, and go about their business. 

In Write Outside: Outdoor Activities and Writing Prompts for English Composition, I begin the section on rhetorical appeals with a chapter explaining the importance of a writer's intended audience. The outdoor activity for the chapter is to collect notes, renderings, or images of fauna. The subsequent writing prompt asks students to explain the symbolic characteristics for one or more of the fauna, and to remain focused on the needs of one specific person throughout the paragraph or essay that emerges. 

Depending on the needs of the specific reader a writer has in mind, this may emerge as a narrative, a concrete description, an expository explanation, or even an argumentative piece of writing. The following are drafts of paragraphs in each of the four modes. Main idea sentences have been underlined.

Sample Narrative Paragraph with Statement of Realization

    I had moved over fifteen times in ten years, and this was the sixteenth move, from Ohio to Georgia after graduate school. It wasn't the first time my car had died during a move, though. The first time my car had died during a move was three years earlier, as I was leaving Mt. Pleasant, Michigan after finishing my undergraduate degree. I'd come a long way during that time. My belongings were now packed in suitcases instead of trash bags, and I'd racked up another degree. My car was a few years newer, and I'd made a few more life-long friends. Yet there I sat, and as I sat at the intersection of I-285 and Roswell Road in Atlanta, Georgia, in a broken-down car full of all my possessions, I couldn't help but feel a bit like a snail with its home slung across its back. If only I'd known how wise a totem the snail would turn out to be for me, I would have embraced it and allowed myself to absorb and appreciate how life was right then instead of restlessly pushing for life to "go, go, go," always forward in a ceaseless state of change. 

Sample Descriptive Paragraph with Dominant Impression

    We walked together along the cobblestone streets of Athens, Ohio. I wore jeans and a military jacket, so I blended into the grey of the sidewalk and sky. I could smell the impending snow. Clouds of breath that emerged from our faces and hung over our heads. It was cold, and there may have been snow, but the salt and traffic turned all of it to dirty slush. You, however, wore a red dress, refusing to be daunted by the cold, the dreary, the depressing mess of winter. It wrapped around your legs in the wind. Instead of huddling inside your black wrap, you let it fly behind you like a cape. You were the ladybug, the ladybird beetle, the coccinella novemnotata, destroyer of the smaller, parasitic insects, the aphids who were sucking all the sweetness from the bars we visited that night. It wasn’t the only time, though, that you took on the persona of that deceptively beautiful warrior. Time and again you donned your red dress, accessorized with black boots and a black rose for your hair, and time and again you protected all of us from the hoards at the bar, like we were your garden and it was your job. The memory of you, Donatella, in your red dress, will always remind me of the ladybird beetle.

Sample Expository Paragraph with Concluding Topic Sentence

    The AMC Hornet was produced between 1970 and 1977. The cars themselves had nothing in common with the insects. They certainly didn't look like hornets. The association was purely symbolic. According to the Spirit Animal Totems web site,  wasps symbolize making a plan and following through on that plan passionately, without the fear of change. The wasp is a reminder to express thoughts freely and for people to "do their own thing." Wendy Jackson relates much the same on a web page called "Wasp Spirit Animal: Meaning, Symbolism, Dream of the Wasp Totem." She adds, however, that a "Wasp, at times, works as a group and, in some instances, work as one," which means they represent both teamwork and independence. If ever there was a totem animal that symbolized the road trip with friends, the hornet or wasp may be it. For people ready for a change of scenery, ready to hop in a car and follow through on a plan to hit the open road with a group of independent, adventurous friends, a car called a Hornet might just be the most sensible choice.

Sample Argumentative Paragraph with Topic Sentence

Aesop got it wrong. In the story of the ant and the grasshopper, one of Aesop's fables, the grasshopper is depicted as lazier than the ant, and deserving of his impending starvation when the enterprising ant refuses to feed the grasshopper. What Aesop's fable fails to recognize, however, is that the grasshopper represents something sometimes far more important than being enterprising: appreciating the life that surrounds us. "Stop and smell the roses," goes the old adage. "Appreciate the moment," people are told again and again: "Live in the present." Instead of socking away seeds all summer and fall, Grasshopper socked away memories, sensory descriptions, and the soulful energy of a thousand observations. For this the grasshopper should not be punished. He was doing what grasshoppers do. Artists, writers, and scientists alike must observe the life around them in order to do the work important to them, to live up to their potential. Imagine a world where artists, writers, and scientists lack the time to observe. Aesop got it wrong.

Works Cited

Raven, Silken. "Wasp." Spirit Animal Totems,  https://www.spirit-animals.com/wasp-symbolism/, Accessed March 2, 2021.

Jackson, Wendy. "Wasp Spirit Animal: Meaning, Symbolism, Dream of the Wasp Totem,"  https://www.zodiacsigns-horoscope.com/spirit-animals/wasp-spirit-animal-totem/, Accessed March 2, 2021.

Copyright Amy Lynn Hess. Please contact the author for permission to republish.