Kent Meyers' Working is an essay that addresses the subject inherent in its title: work, but not in the modern sense where people think of going to the office to work eight hours a day. . For Meyers, work meant hard physical labor on a cattle farm, which was not only a responsibility, but also served as a mechanism that connected him to himself as well as the people around him . In order to present his subject, Meyers writes in the Romantic style in a conversational, rhetorical, and informal tone. In an essay that uses cattle as a subject, Meyers' use of the romantic style does not realistically attempt to intensify the subject. something grander, but still keeping the subject grounded. Even in the first paragraph, Meyers does not choose to present cattle as an object of beauty and admiration, but instead shows reality by telling readers that cattle are "branded, castrated, transported to a sale barn, forced into trucks.” » (119). Meyers establishes his authority by letting readers know that he lived on a farm and grew up working with livestock – an experience the majority of readers may never have had. When Meyers describes the calves in the second paragraph and describes the feeding ritual, the reader knows that Meyers has the authority to write an essay about working with livestock. So the essay's descriptions (of livestock, feeding, transporting silage, etc.) give concrete details about the work Meyers did on the farm so that readers can understand. The essay also lends itself to its informal style by using weak diction throughout the essay. I read the essay with ease, never feeling any confusion about what was being said or why something was being said. Meyers words u...... middle of paper ...... patterns of writing in the essay such as parallelism, similes, metaphors, and rhetorical questions. In order to support Meyers's thesis that cattle had a fundamental role in how he lived his life, he organizes the essay to explain the thesis by telling small anecdotes. Meyers begins by describing the hard work on the farm and the chores that had to be done at home, compared to "Retard" who claimed in his essay that city children worked as hard as farm children. Next, Meyers explains how the experience of being a hard worker has helped him throughout his years in college and beyond, and how his work has helped him stay connected to the world. Meyers then uses the scene of the running cattle to give climatic meaning to the essay and ends by culminating all the different experiences into a discovery more powerful than the work itself..