Note 1

My anthology theme is summer and I got this passage from Holes by Louis Sachar.

There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.  There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in Texas.  That was over a hundred years ago.  Now it is just a dry flat wasteland.  There used to be a town of Green Lake as well.  The town shriveled and dried up along with the lake, and the people who lived there.  During the summer the daytime temperature hovers around ninety-five degrees in the shade- if you can find any shade.  Theres not much shade in a bid dry lake.  The only trees are two old oaks on the eastern edge of the "lake"....

 In the book Holes by Louis Sachar, the author has a straightforward and common diction while also having a choppy almost jerky sentence structure and voice.  The desert setting is described by the author as "just a dry flat wasteland."  Sachar illustrates the barrenness of the desert  "the town shriveled and dried up along with the lake, and the people who lived there."  In this passage Sachar is very straightforward while describing the setting, he even estimates an average temperature to describe the heat "the daytime temperature hovers around ninety-five degrees in the shade."  Sachar's structure of utilizing short sentences gives a feel as if the whole first chapter is just spilling out facts to describe the setting.