Roads To Quoz Blog

 Roads to Quoz Blog

In the extract from Road to Quoz, An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon, We read a brief description of the events that took place at Joe’s Country Store. Throughout the text which is travel writing the author goes into heavy and intricate detail about Joe’s country shack. The structure of the excerpt is in paragraph form with small breaks in between the somewhat medium-sized paragraphs. The style of the writing seems very bland in an emotive sense and doesn’t try to connect to the reader very much.

The text is from a book that is written in the first person and the writing is in a form called travel writing. The form helps the reader understand why many of the things that the author writes are written in the ways they are like how the author uses words like we and I because the writing is an autobiography which means the author would be writing about events that occurred to them. Having the form be easy to understand for the reader helps the reader immerse themselves within the story. An example of the perspective of the extract is when the author states “We went into Little Lanesboro to Joe’s country store.”

In the extract the structure is somewhat important to the storytelling of the excerpt. The structure of this extract contains four small to medium-length paragraphs. The reason that the structure is actually important to the story in this extract because the small gaps in between each paragraph show small passages of time an example of this is at the end of paragraph 3 the line states “run home and bring back your laptop.” after a gap paragraph 4 starts off with “About the time Q and I finished our hoagies, Sarah returned and sat down with us in one of the four wooden-booths.” This small gap actually shows a small passage of time which helps the reader understand what is happening within the story and allows the author to not have to write more filler sentences and he is able to skip that.

The language of the excerpt is very important to the readers comprehension of the text because it gives the reader a little to go off so they can have their own thoughts about the author based off of the writing, story telling, and language choices. The language that the author uses is very bland, he doesn’t seem to show much emotion when talking about anything but he does go into crazy detail about minimal things like in paragraph one where the author talks about sandwiches and states “but in the eastern corner it can be hoagie or a bomber, and a little farther on eastward, it becomes a grinder.” The language used throughout the entire extract seems as though the man is very uninterested in any of the things that he is doing or anything that he is talking to the people about but he does seem to be interested in things that he wants to talk about. Another important thing to mention is the style that the author chose and portrays throughout the excerpt. The author really doesn’t present much of a style to the reader except for how the author describes things in heavy detail so if it was given a style I think that it would be descriptive.

Overall I think that the author did a good job at describing the setting and what happened at Joe’s Country store. I didn’t like however how the author made the character very bland and that the characters didn’t really have any character to them.