Theme Structure

The following is an example of an essay that combines the various structural elements that make for effective writing: word choice, sentence style, paragraph organization. The essay is by Edwin Way Teale. It is a great essay, and it is not un-typical of the kind of writing he has done throughout his career. He makes it seem easy, natural. But there is little natural about writing even when the subject is nature.

THUNDER PUMPER

Beyond the sluggish water of the brown swamp stream, the forest of cattails rises in a dense wall of vertical lines. [Descriptive introductory technique] On the edge of the stream, before the cattails, frozen in one position, its bill pointing skyward, its body merging amazingly with its background, stands an American bittern, the thunder pumper of the swamp.[thesis]

No other member of the heron tribe is more shy, more secretive, than the bittern.  [deductive topic sentence] Neither of the two great pioneers of ornithology, Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon, ever saw a bittern's nest. Even the eggs of these elusive swamp dwellers are camouflaged. They are almost exactly the color of the dead flag leaves of which the nest is usually formed.

It has been formed by competent observers that when an intermittent breeze blows over a stretch of marshland, an upright bittern will remain motionless as long as the air is calm. But when the cattails around it begin to wave in the breeze, it, too, sometimes begins swaying. Thus its form and vertical stripings help make it inconspicuous under either condition. [inductive topic sentence]

It is largely through the love song of the male, one of the most strange and unmusical serenades in the world, that we know the American bittern. [deductive topic sentence]  Its sucking, pumping, booming sound will carry as far as half a mile across a quiet marsh. I have heard it for weeks, now, most often at dawn, and twilight. The sound has been recorded in such phrases as pump-er lunk" and plum-pudd'n." It has been likened to the noise of an old-fashioned wooden pump and to the sound of a stake being pulled from soft mud. It has given the bird its common names of stake driver and thunder pumper. On at least one occasion, a bittern has been heard pumping thirty feet up in a tree.

Almost every movement of the bittern is stealthy and deliberate. [deductive topic sentence] Its feet are lifted so slowly the movement is almost imperceptible. They are set down with equal care. Thus it draws close to its prey. Frogs, fish, small snakes, meadow mice, crayfish, grasshoppers, and even dragonflies are speared by the lance bill of the bittern.

During the early days of this month, the female has begun incubating the eggs in carefully secreted nests among the cattails. This continues for twenty-eight days. The baby bitterns, from three to seven in number, remain in the nest for an additional two weeks after hatching. Their first plumage is buffy down that, like the eggs, matches the color of the dead flag leaves around them. Later, their bodies gain the vertical striping which plays such an important part in their secretive, adult way of life. [unifying device: repeating the theme of secrecy begun in the introduction] (Circle 107-8)

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