Teachable Moments
After reading “Flowers for Algernon,” my students took a unit test comprised of text-dependent multiple-choice questions and a standardized writing task. Independently, while my students showed progress, many of them failed in including everything necessary for a complete student response.
Therefore during the month of October, I decided to include some suspenseful stories and incorporate more writing.
The first story of the month was Henry Slesar’s “Examination Day.” Overall, the students enjoyed the story even though they couldn’t understand how something like that could really happen.
Writing Task
You have read “Examination Day” a short story about a twelve-year-old boy named Richard “Dickie” Jordan who takes a government intelligence exam to see how smart he is. Write an essay identifying specific word choices and how those words impact the tone and give hints to what may happen in the story. Be sure to use specific evidence to support your response.
Student Response
Have you ever had the feeling that something wasn’t quite right? In Henry Sleser’s short story, “Examination Day,” Richard “Dickie” Jordan takes a government examination to test his intelligence. He is unaware of what the examination is for, but through the author’s word choice, the readers are able to determine that something isn’t right and the anxious tone of the narrator hints that something unfortunate is going to happen.
The author’s vocabulary usage impacts the tone and foreshadows events that will take place later in the story. Slesar states, “He wanted the day to be happy, and the moistness of his mother’s eyes, the scowl of his father’s face, spoiled the mood of expectation with which he had greeted the morning” (Slesar 1). The word moistened creates a tone of sorrow that foretells that something will upset his mother further on in the passage, as well as makes you feel pity for her and the boy because they just wanted to enjoy his 12th birthday. The terms scowl and spoiled create a feeling of vexation and foreshadow that something unpleasant will occur later on in the story to make his father angry.
The tone is developed throughout the passage through Slesar’s terminology and hints at what will take place at a later date in the story. Slesar writes, “‘Well, Dick,’ he said, with a manly frown, ‘you’ve got an appointment today.’” (Slesar 2). The expression of a frown, which the author uses often in the story, creates a sullen tone and foretells that something about Dickie’s appointment was going to go wrong and that something might happen to him. By the end of the story, the author’s hints are revealed to be that Dickie is put to death for exceeding the government’s level of allowable intelligence.
When one considers the author’s suspenseful word choices and the anxious tone, one can see that something unfortunate was going to happen. The tone and word choice of the passage greatly affect the reader to create an entertaining and mysterious story. Rebecca Solnit once said, “You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.”
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