Kent Meyers’ Working

Kent Meyers’ Working is an essay which talks about the subject inherent in its title: working, though not in the modern sense where people think of going to the office to work eight hours a day. Work for Meyers meant hard physical work on a cattle farm that wasn’t only a responsibility, but it served as a mechanism that connects him to himself as well as with the people around him. In order present his topic, Meyers writes in the Romantic style in a tone that is conversational, rhetorical, and informal.

In an essay that uses cattle as the subject, Meyers’ use of the Romantic style realistically does not try to heighten the subject into something grander, but keeps the subject grounded. Even in the first paragraph, Meyers does not choose to present the cattle as an object of beauty and admiration, but he shows the reality instead by telling the readers that the cattle get “branded, castrated, hauled to a sale barn, forced into trucks” (119). Meyers establishes authority by letting the readers know that he lived on a farm and grew up working with cattle – an experience which the majority of the readers may not have ever experienced. When Meyers describes the calves in the second paragraph and goes into describing the feeding ritual, the reader knows that Meyers does have the authority to write an essay about working with cattle. Thus, the descriptions in the essay (of the cattle, the feeding, the hauling of silage, etc) give concrete details of the work that Meyers did on the farm so that the readers are able to understand. The essay also lends to its informal style by using low diction throughout the essay. I read the essay with ease, never feeling a sense of confusion on what and why something was being said. The words Meyers u...

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... writing schemes in the essay such as parallelism, similes, metaphors, and rhetorical questions.

In order to support Meyers’ thesis that cattle had a fundamental role in the way he lived his life, he organizes the essay in such a way that explains the thesis by telling little anecdotes. Meyers starts by describing the hard work on the farm and the chores that had to be done around the house, as compared to the “Retard” that claimed in his essay that town kids worked as hard as farm kids. Next, Meyers applies how the experience of being a hard worker had helped him through his years in college and beyond, and how the work helped him keep in contact with the world. Meyers then uses the escaped cattle scene to give a climatic sense to the essay, and ends by culminating all of the various experiences into a discovery that is more powerful than the work itself.