Endangered Animal Paper

This is a short paper about the endangered animal you are researching for science class. You do it on your own, not with a partner. In this paper, you must get across the important facts about your animal's appearance, habitat, life cycle, role in the ecosystem, behavior, and reason for endangerment.

Write it as if you were writing an exciting nature documentary. In good nature writing or in a documentary, the writer must do two things well:

• Make it interesting.
• Get the facts right.

From your research, you know the facts about your animal's appearance, habitat, life cycle, place in the ecosystem, behavior, and reason for endangerment. However, it makes a deadly dull paper to list these facts in order, shoving in a few topic sentences and a few concluding sentences. Here's how you can make your writing interesting. Click on the links to go to an explanation for each thing on the list.

• Use strong verbs.
• Use the active voice.
• Avoid overusing the verb "to be"
• Use specific nouns
• Give sensory details.
• Begin in medias res (in the middle of things)
• Vary your sentence structure

Strong verbs

Some verbs are more descriptive than others. They create vivid images in the mind of the reader. You can say that an animal eats grass, but it is more descriptive if it munches on grass, or grazes in the pasture, or nibbles on stalks of grass. Look for verbs that say exactly the kind of thing you want.

• For instance, instead of "yell," say shriek, scream, bellow, hoot, howl, wail, chirp, or yowl.
• Instead of "jump," say leap, hop, bound, scamper, bounce, or pounce.
• Instead of "eat," say gobble, nibble, taste, devour, gnaw, gulp, taste, or browse.
• Instead of "see," say notice, spy, witness, observe, recognize, glimpse, peep, peek, survey, or reconnoiter.

If you want ideas for verbs, use a thesaurus. You can also consult an online thesaurus, such as Thesaurus.com.However, if you use a thesaurus, do yourself a favor and look up unfamiliar words before you use them. Although a word may seem to be a synonym, sometimes it doesn't fit in your sentence.

Active voice

The active voice of a verb gets the reader involved. Many students (many adults, too!) use the passive voice too much.

In the passive voice, you would say:

• Grass is eaten by the buffalo.
• Rabbits are preyed upon by the lynx.

You can see that these sentences just sort of sit there. Sometimes, the passive is even worse. In some sentences, you have no idea what the subject is. You just know the verb and the object. For example:

• Mice are eaten.
• The Malabar large spotted civet is threatened.

Who eats those mice? We have no idea. What is threatening those seals? Get active. In the active voice, something gets done, and we know who does it:

• The buffalo eats grass.
• The lynx preys on rabbits.
• The hawk hunts and eats mice.
• Deforestation threatens the Malabar large spotted civet.

In your writing, look for the subjects of your sentences and make sure they haven't wandered passively to the end of the sentence.

Avoid the verb "to be"

"To be" is a linking verb. It connects a subject with a subject complement or an adjective complement. In writing, this means you are putting two things together. That's all, just putting them together. You can see that this might tend to make your writing static. Static means it isn't going anywhere. Too bad that many students use the verb "to be" for practically everything.

• Leopards are spotted.
• Blue whales are huge.
• The naked mole rat is a mammal.
• This rhino is a native of Sumatra.

Sometimes you can't avoid sentences like this. However, one way out is to use your adjective complements as regular adjectives, and combine them with other information to make a good sentence.

• The spotted leopard hunts in open terrain and grassland.
• The huge blue whale overshadows even the biggest brontosaurus.

You can use your subject complements as appositives. An appositive is a noun, noun phrase, or noun clause which follows a noun and describes or renames it. You show an appositive by separating it with commas.

• The naked mole rat, a mammal, lives in large communities.
• The rhino, a native of Sumatra, survives in very small numbers in Asia.

Specific nouns

Some nouns are more descriptive than others. A dog can be a pup, a cur, a whelp, a mutt, a mastiff, or a Chihuahua. "Dog" is a very general noun. "Animal" is even more general. Because they are simple and easy, they get overused, and soon become deadly dull. Look for specific words that put vivid images in the mind of your reader. When describing your animal's habitat, don't say "birds," say "toucans," "crows," "herons," or names of other specific birds that are native to the area. Do the same with "trees," or "ground," or "bushes." If you want ideas for nouns, use a thesaurus. You can also consult an online thesaurus, such as Thesaurus.com.However, if you use a thesaurus, do yourself a favor and look up unfamiliar words before you use them. Although a word may seem to be a synonym, sometimes it doesn't fit in your sentence.

One word of warning: Don't use too many long words, either. Keep it simple.

Sensory details

To hook your reader, it helps if you use rich description. Don't just say your animal lives in a rainforest. Say it spends its nights in a hot, wet, noisy rainforest filled with the cries of strange monkeys and the tiny scuttling footsteps of the insects it eats. Put your reader in the scene. What are the smells, sounds, sights, feelings, and tastes of the situation? If the reader were there, what would he or she see? What would he smell? What kinds of things would touch her skin, or fall in her hair? When your animal eats, what does he taste?

You have seen pictures of your animal, and that will help with visual images. However, you can also use other types of facts to help you with other sensory images. For instance, if your animal lives in the ocean, you know what the ocean sounds like, smells like, feels like, and even tastes like. If you know the normal temperature of your animal's habitat, you know if it is cold or hot, wet or dry. If your animal lives in the mountains, the air is thinner.

Get your facts right. Don't make things up. But don't be afraid to use the facts to make your writing stronger.

Begin in medias res

"In medias res" is Latin for "in the middle of things." A good piece of nature writing does NOT start:

"This is a paper about the spotted tree frog."

or, even worse,

"My animal is the spotted tree frog."

I call that kind of topic sentence a "picture frame." Instead, it might start

"A small transparent crayfish creeps out from under a rock in a Canadian stream, bravely seeking food. It is unaware of the danger. Suddenly, an amphibian leaps upon it, eating the unwary animal before it even knows what happened. What is this unexpected amphibian? It is the endangered spotted tree frog."

or, more simply,

"A mottled green and brown frog sits quietly in a rocky stream, waiting for food to walk by. This quiet animal, the spotted tree frog, is endangered."

You start your paper right in the middle of things. You jump right in and start showing what the animal is like, what it does, and where it lives. The best kind of beginning is like the beginning of a story about your animal--a story about its everyday life. It's almost like writing fiction--but again, you have to get your facts right.

You can start with your animal being born, or hunted by a predator, or hunting its own prey. You can tell a love story, of how it finds its mate, or choose a special occasion such as a forest fire, a drought, or simply a change of seasons.

After you have hooked your reader, then you can drop the intensity a little and give some background information.

Varying sentence structure

If your sentences are all built the same way, your writing will act like a sleeping pill or a rocking chair, rocking your reader to sleep. For example:

Elephants eat plants. They need a great deal of food. Elephants can consume as much as 500 pounds of plants a day. They use their trunks to pull branches off trees. They uproot grass. They pluck fruit out of the trees. Elephants use their trunks to smell. The trunk is also used for drinking.

These sentences are all simple. They consist of a simple subject and a simple predicate, with a couple of prepositional phrases and infinitives thrown into the mix. This is writing designed to bore the audience.

The first thing you can do to vary sentence structure is to combine two simple sentences in a compound sentence, using coordinating conjunctions such as for/and/nor/but/or/yet/so (the acronym FANBOYS will help you remember these). A coordinating conjunction takes a comma before it.

• Elephants eat plants, and they need a great deal of this type of food.
• An elephant uses his trunk to smell, but also uses it to drink.
• Elephants can eat as much as 500 pounds of food a day, yet all they eat is plants.

Another thing is to join two sentences in a complex sentence, using a subordinating conjunction such as after/although/as/because/before/how/if/since/than/that/though/until. In a complex sentence, one of the clauses is more important than the other.

• Although elephants eat as much as 500 pounds of food a day, they can only eat plants.
• Since the elephant's trunk is very flexible, he can use it for many different purposes.
• After elephants rip branches off the trees, they eat the leaves.

A third way to vary your sentences is to combine them by using appositives. An appositive is a noun, noun phrase, or noun clause which follows a noun and describes or renames it. You show an appositive by separating it with commas.

• A vegetarian, the elephant can eat as much as 500 pounds of plants a day.
• The flexible trunk, the elephant's nose, is also used as its hand and its mouth.

A fourth way is to use words as different parts of speech. For instance, the word "vegetarian" can be used either as a noun or as an adjective. You can say "the elephant is a vegetarian," but you can also say "the vegetarian elephant." Use a verb in its participial form as an adjective: the leopard pounces, so it is a pouncing leopard. Or you can use a verb in its participial form as a noun (a special case called a gerund). If a hawk often screams as it circles in order to cause its prey to freeze, you can say, "Screaming is the hawk's way of terrifying its prey."

Finally, you can combine sentences to form lists.

• Elephants browse on leaves, grass, fruit, and other plant materials.
• The elephant's trunk is used for smelling, drinking, eating, and greeting.

There are many other ways to vary your sentence structure. It's all right to have some simple sentences in your paper. In fact, too many long-winded sentences can leave your reader gasping for breath.

Try Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) page on Sentence Variety at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/general/gl_sentvar.html for more ideas.