Unit 6 Blog - Roads to Quoz, An American Mosey Analysis

Unit 6 Blog - Roads to Quoz, An American Mosey Analysis

The text we read was the short story by the name of Roads to Quoz, An American Mosey, by William Least Heat-Moon. This story contains many elements of form, structure, and language that differ it from other stories and make it intriguing.

The first piece of this article that we need to analyze is the form. This article most closely resembles a professional travel writing that would be found in a blog or interest forum and is designed to appeal to people who are curious about the cities outside mainstream America. We can see this mainly through the language used throughout the text, which is something that will be discussed later in my analysis. The amount of detail the author uses to describe the store and grinder also goes to show that this article is meant to describe an experience. 

Going over the structure of the article we can learn a lot about this piece as well. The main points we can grab from the structure of this article are from where and how the paragraphs are positioned. First of all, we can see that the writing follows a timeline but the paragraphs aren’t separated to show different events across it. Instead, we can see that the paragraphs are positioned to show different thoughts that occur to the author. The first paragraph discusses the store and what the author sees from a glance. The second goes over the grinder that is being made for them. The third involves dialog between multiple people and the last paragraph is like a short history lesson about the town. The paragraphs are built this way to show an audience the process of what one would experience when coming into the store for the first time. Each event is separated and spaced out to make them important in their own ways. Another point that can be covered is the anaphoric/cataphoric usage of the word “she” in place of Betty the owner at this time. The usage of the word she can show that the person is significant enough to be memorable and her name doesn't need to be said multiple times. 

Finally, one of the bigger sections of analysis is analyzing the language used throughout the text. As I said before, the article is written much like a professional travel writing, this can be better seen when taking note of the language used in the text. One of the main lexical indicators that this is professional is the level of formality that the text uses. Formal language like ‘commentary,’ rather than ‘talking’ or even ‘chit-chatting,’ shows formality in the writing. There are other examples of this throughout the passage of course but this was one of the big examples. The language used in this text also works to show how different this town is from the rest of the United States. Sentences like, ‘in the eastern corner it can be a hoagie or a bomber, and a little further eastward, it becomes a grinder. The rest of the country, generally, has seen other names vanish…” set the setting of this town apart from that of an average society. This enhances the interest of the audience and makes the story overall more intriguing. Continuing, the text also makes the reader aware that the rural areas of America are not what was expected, “I expected the customary, personal archive… an album of blurry snapshots…” but the author was instead greeted with a laptop. This develops a sense of surprise for the audience and tells the audience that rural areas are not as different as we may perceive them as.