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Description 2
Description is closely allied with narration because both include many specific details.
However, unlike narration, description evokes the senses by painting a picture of how
something looks, sounds, smells, tastes, or feels. Rarely is an entire essay descriptive,
but clear and vivid description can make writing more persuasive. Seeing what the writer
sees and feeling what the writer feels enables the reader to empathize with the speaker,
with the subject at hand, and with the position argued.

Analyzing Methods of Development
Read this opinion piece in which artist, design researcher, and professor at Olin
College of Engineering Sara Hendren argues that rethinking time is a simple tool for
improving cities. Section 1 / Logical Reasoning and Organization: Shaping an Argument

The Simplest Tool for Improving Cities Is Also Free

Sarah Hendren

For decades, a stretch of Memorial Drive here It happens in cities everywhere: design, or
that runs along the Charles River has been redesign, created by time. A weekend clock turns
closed to automobiles on Sundays for the an open street into something else entirely —
warmer half of the year. In the absence of cars a time structure organized outside commuter
on a four-lane thoroughfare beside the water, all efficiency or traffic flows. Urban planners
kinds of other street uses blossom: skateboards, sometimes call it “temporal zoning.”
bicycles, hoverboards, strollers, wheelchairs and In 2020 and 2021, in response to the need for
walkers, people on feet and on wheels now outdoor recreation during the pandemic, the
moving slowly enough to witness the late spring city of Cambridge added Saturday hours for
goslings, the ever-present sea gulls or the rarer Riverbend Park, doubling its recreational time.
magic and grace of a heron feeding along the Two luxurious weekend days of an open street
water’s edge. A towering line of stately, cente- from April to November — a provisional state of
narian sycamores forms an unbroken canopy the built environment, like hundreds of other
over several blocks. pandemic-led pilot projects happening right
This section of Memorial Drive is formally now all over the world. Each of these urban
called “Riverbend Park” during its weekend clo- innovations carries with it a question: Can this
sures, but it’s not a park in any physical, structural last? Should it?
sense. It’s an open public space transformed into As cities across the world open up, urban 5
a park without any construction. State park planners and architects — and the rest of
employees arrive in trucks in the morning and us — are looking around, asking whether our
again in the evening at junctures in the road, streets and buildings will be, or should be, the
placing gates, cones, and signs that cut off traffic. same again. But whatever we decide, there’s
By dusk, the gates disappear, and traffic returns. one transformational tool for building the cities
That’s it — a park that is “found” from what’s that’s right in front of us, calling for more sus-
already there. tained attention: the design of time. We can
(continued )
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Uncorrected proofs have been used in this sample. Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.
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