Structure

"The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society"

             One thing that stuck out for me while reading this passage was the sheer amount of examples Kozol developed, and how he presented his ideas to the reader. Not only did he jumpy right into his subject, he "listed" (I use quotations because it wasn't really a list, but rather, a string of well developed paragraphs that, if paraphrased, could become a list) multiple examples from the start. All of these examples were large paragraphs, evenly spaced. The amount of words, the enormity of each of these paragraphs was well-balanced, and I never felt like one example outweighed the other in terms of how much real estate that particular example had in the passage.
           Something I really liked about this format of equally large paragraphs was that the passage as a whole was short. It wasn't very difficult to read, and even though there were large paragraphs, the examples were laid out well enough that I never felt like the structure was awkward or irrational.
           More than once, Kovol uses the structure of a single sentence paragraph. This allows for a sort of break in the flow of the passage, and really caught my attention as a reader. While reading, partly because this passage is pretty powerful, these single sentences would serve as an almost rude wake up call. The paragraphs in this passage get bigger and smaller gradually, creating a nice, even flow between each example that culminates with the largest paragraph, and ebbs down to smaller and smaller groups of sentences until the reader is just left with another single sentence, which causes all of their attention to be drawn to the meaning behind that peculiar sentence, which starts off the next example, and then flows into larger and larger paragraphs and so on.
            Kovol's gradual increase and decrease in the size of his paragraphs help with the flow of his work. The structure serves as a metaphor for conversation; one does not start talking about a subject full force, or without some sort of prompt, no, they bring up the topic, start sharing ideas, and then elaborate on their ideas, and keep talking until they are able to sum up the meaning or message of their ideas in a single grouping of words, which at that point helps them share their idea legibly and well-developed.
Other than that, I really didn't notice anything too spectacular about this passage.