How would you describe your experience reading Henry Petroski’s “Design out of a Paper Bag”? In 75 to 100 words, describe what y
ou think about the difficulty of the passage, its sentences and individual words, the concepts it develops, and your interest in the topic. What strategies did you use to help you understand the difficult sections? Mention some specifics that you found challenging.
In the passage, the sentence form is complicated. This sophisticates the sound. The tone is often personal, especially as the author discusses situations at the grocery store that he has encountered. The depiction of food objects rolling around in the trunk of a vehicle, for example, is something that most readers undoubtedly have familiarity with first-hand and would find humorous. The author also jokes that the once near-perfect upstanding paper bag" has almost replaced the plastic bag. The term upstanding can be taken simply to mean something that sticks up upright like a paper bag, or it can mean positive character. So out of that the poet makes a funny pun. As the author is frustrated that plastic bags are now more tolerated than paper ones, the essay ends on an unhappy note.
I enjoyed learning about the history of the grocery bag. I didn’t realize that the design of a simple object like a paper bag had undergone so many changes. I had difficulty understanding the text in a few places. Occasionally the writer would list a lot of details at once. Some of the sentences were also really long and complex. I also had difficulty relating to the writer's experiences with shopping. Some of these experiences happened before I was born. Talking to my mom about this section of the reading made the text easier to understand.
