Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth - Entry 3

Quote:

"AT CHRISTMAS, I was out on the prairie again. Third time in a year. It seems like I can't stay away. This time, I came up out of Council Grove, Kansas, at seven A.M., just around sunrise. For about a minute and a half, I saw the sun and the full moon balanced evenly at the opposite ends of the sky. And her was I, riding along the bald and slightly arched surface of the earth, halfway between the two.

What are we doing on this planet, and how did we get here? It took only a glance to tell that there would not be anything like us found on the yellow sun or the fast-paling  moon. The Earth has one thing that neither the sun nor moon has ever had.

And that one thing is clay.

I stopped by the Spring Hill Ranch, where there's a break in the fence. I like to walk the erosion gullies on the virgin prairie. There are fossils in the lower strata, as thick as nuts in an almond bar. But that morning, I found clay. I dug it out with a stone and formed it into small flutes and bowls. It was almost greasy to the touch, it had a sheen about it, and you could shape it into anything." 

Chapter: Clay and Life (p. 123) Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth by William Bryant Logan 

Background:

 After reading my 50 or so pages for the week, I took a look at the questions to post answers to for today. They all seemed to have to do with tone and voice, what persona the author takes on. I figured that the whole book could be used as an example of my answer to this question, so I randomly moved to one of the chapters that were fresh in my head. When I read the quote above, this song popped into my head and so I went with it.

In this chapter and many many others, the author adopts the persona of a friend; a very descriptive friend, but a friend nonetheless. He treats the beginnings of his chapters like the beginning of a casual conversation "At Christmas I was out on the prairie again. Third time this year." He leaks otherwise personal seeming information to you as if you cared. As a reader, you don't care about his addiction to visiting the prairie ("It seems like I can't stay away.") or that he "saw the sun and the full moon balanced evenly at the opposite ends of the sky". We don't care about any of these things. When we pick up a nonfictional book, we read it for information, not for an author's life experiences, yet it is those useless details and bits of unimportant information that keep me interested as a reader. It makes it feel like I know the author as a friend and that he is really talking to me rather than writing a boring book for me to read.

What is the intended audience and how does he tailor his writing to the audience?

Considering the subject of the book, level of vocabulary, and assumed understanding of certain concepts prior to reading the book, I think William wrote the book with the intention of college students, maybe seniors in high school, and adults reading this book. If he wrote it for students, he definitely did his job well. He writes descriptively to keep the student slightly entertained, but he also is sure to not hide his important information underneath all the description. "I found clay. I dug it out with a stone and formed it into flutes and bowls. It was almost greasy to the touch, it had a sheen about it, and you could shape it into anything." In this section of the quote, he places nothing but information about clay. He starts by nonchalantly showing the historical and traditional uses of clay which are shaping it into "flutes and bowls". He then moves on to describe its texture as "almost greasy to the touch", its look as having "a sheen about it" and its physical properties as being able to "shape it into anything." He then moves on to give hard facts about clay after the quote above. If a college or high school student was reading this book, they would easily be able to obtain the information. If an adult was reading this, they would be entertained by the amount of personalization in what would seem at first like a dull and boring nonfiction book.