Kent Meyers' Working is an essay that addresses the theme inherent in the title: working, although not in the modern sense in which one thinks of going to the office to work eight hours a day. Work for Meyers meant hard physical labor on a cattle ranch that was not only a responsibility, but served as a mechanism that connected him to himself and the people around him. To present his topic, Meyers writes in a Romantic style with a conversational, rhetorical, and informal tone. In an essay that uses cattle as its subject, Meyers' use of romantic style realistically does not attempt to escalate the subject into something grander, but keeps the subject grounded. Even in the first paragraph, Meyers does not choose to present cattle as objects of beauty and admiration, but instead shows the reality by telling readers that cattle are "branded, castrated, hauled to a sale barn, forced onto trucks" (119) .Meyers establishes authority by letting readers know that he lived on a farm and grew up working with cattle, an experience that most readers may never have had feeding, the reader knows that Meyers has the authority to write an essay about working with livestock. Therefore, the descriptions in the essay (of the livestock, feeding, hauling silage, etc.) provide concrete details of the work performed. by Meyers on the farm so readers can understand. The essay also lends itself to its informal style by using low diction throughout the essay I read the essay with ease, never feeling a sense of confusion as to what and why was being said something. The words Meyers u...... middle of paper...... write patterns in the essay such as parallels, similes, metaphors, and rhetorical questions. To support Meyers's thesis that livestock played a major role in how he lived his life, he organizes his essay to explain his thesis through small anecdotes. Meyers begins by describing the hard work on the farm and household chores, compared to the "retard" who stated in his essay that city children worked just as hard as country children. Next, Meyers explains how his experience as a hard worker helped him through his college years and beyond, and how the job helped him stay connected to the world. Meyers then uses the scene of the fleeing cattle to give a climactic sense to the essay, and concludes by culminating all the various experiences into a discovery that is more powerful than the work itself..