We have removed many of the modifiers in the following passage from Life on the Mississippi, in which Mark Twain describes how he felt as a young pilot taking the helm on his own, unaware that his mentor Mr. Bixby was watching nearby.
• Read the paragraph aloud, and listen to its cadence (the combination of the text’s rhythm with the rise and fall in the inflection of the speaker’s voice).
• Add the following modifiers: frightful, easy, calmly, deadly, blind, vaingloriously, sole, gaily, awful, entirely, prodigiously. (Check the meaning of any unfamiliar words.) Use these adjectives and adverbs to improve the paragraph’s effectiveness.
• Compare your version to the original (see pp. 852–53, par. 57).
• Discuss the rhetorical effect of the modifiers in this passage.
I did not know that he was hiding behind a chimney to see how I would perform. I went along, getting prouder and prouder, for he had never left the boat in my charge such a length of time before. I even got to “setting” her and letting the wheel go, while I turned my back and inspected the stern marks and hummed a tune, a sort of indifference which I had admired in Bixby and other great pilots. Once I inspected rather long, and when I faced to the front again my heart flew into my mouth so suddenly that if I hadn’t clapped my teeth together I should have lost it. One of those bluff reefs was stretching its length right across our bows! My head was gone in a moment; I did not know which end I stood on; I gasped and could not get my breath; I spun the wheel down with such rapidity that it wove itself together like a spider’s web; the boat answered and turned square away from the reef, but the reef followed her! I fled, but still it followed, still it kept—right across my bows! I never looked to see where I was going, I only fled. The crash was imminent. Why didn’t that villain come? If I committed the crime of ringing a bell I might get thrown overboard. But better that than kill the boat. So in desperation I started such a rattling “shivaree” down below as never had astounded an engineer in this world before, I fancy. Amidst the frenzy of the bells the engines began to back and fill in a furious way, and my reason forsook its throne—we were about to crash into the woods on the other side of the river. Just then Mr. Bixby stepped into view on the hurricane deck.