Paragraph Breaks in "Experiencing," "Breakfast with Canis Latrans," and "An Animals Looks At Me"

In Stephen Corey’s essay “Experiencing,” Reg Saner’s “Breakfast with Canis Latrans,” and Charles Bergman’s “An Animal Looks at Me,” the structural choice of paragraph breaks is utilized. It also becomes clear from reading all three essays that the paragraph breaks are used for similar purposes.

     

In the narrative “Experiencing,” Corey begins by describing four separate objects and or people, with each description separated by a line break. These objects are a plastic cap from a bottle, two ants scurrying on a sidewalk, his own foot jiggling while he crossed his leg, and four young dancers. These are the four things that his seventeen-month-old granddaughter observed within one single day in July, and he tries to explain to himself why she was interested in those things specifically. Corey analyzes what these things have in common—motion—and how his granddaughter’s ability to interact/possess these things affected her curiosity. He then relates (after another paragraph break) all of these things to beauty and art, and how beauty and art can be ingrained a human’s repertoire of feelings just as pain can.

Saner’s essay also utilizes paragraph breaks, though the topic of the essay is more about what specific event he experienced. The Canis Latrans, or the coyote, is being observed by Saner through binoculars as it hunts for various varmints on a snowy slope so white the shadows are blue. Detail is given about the way the coyote pounces, its kill rate, and some sympathy for the prey before the first paragraph break occurs. The story shifts to Saner’s own hunting trip, and the intricate and often long tracks that he finds of field mice as they dart from one area of cover to the next. He comes to appreciate just how brave it is for the mice that travel distances of twelve to an impressive sixty yards as they search for food, in danger of becoming prey to the owls of the night. Jumping back to the story of the coyote the kills are documented again, before the final topic of the feeling fear itself is broached, and the dangers of the wild.

Finally there is Bergman’s essay, which also centers around the topic of an animal, or animals in general. The essay begins with the topic of how animals and humans interact, and how inadequate the human philosophies are for dealing with them. People do not know what to think about animals, Bergman notes so most people do not think about them at all. The first paragraph break occurs, and Bergman pulls the reader into his trip to a marsh in Mexico, with descriptions of the marsh and the surrounding areas and endangered species that can be found in this specific marsh. A break occurs again, and then he is describing his encounter with an eared grebe in the marsh, which he wants to take a picture of. The grebe and Bergman make eye contact, and in that moment feels his sense of human superiority is disturbed. The old subject of philosophies is picked up again, and how humans are attempting recently to begin to return the gazes of animals, and what the true relationship between human and animal is.

In all three of these essays, though the topics vary from essay to essay and even within the essays themselves, they all share the structure of frequent paragraph breaks. The breaks are used to differentiate between various topics within the essays, usually topics that connect to one another, and are often touched back upon again later in the piece. These breaks allow for various topics to be discussed in one essay, giving the connection and flow needed so that the area of focus can be widened. Utilizing paragraph breaks that are effective and smooth allows a nonfiction author to widen his or her scope of topic in one essay, making more conclusions and drawing more connections that would be possible if only one topic was focused upon. It also gives the essay a structure that is less confusing, so that topics are not switched mid-paragraph, thereby losing the flow that the author would like to keep.