Prose Analysis

"Science and Beauty" by Isaac Asimov: Qs 1 & 3, 4

1.a) The thesis occurs in the penultimate paragraph: "All of this vision... was made possible by the works of... astronomers".
b) The essay is organized inductively: the topic is introduced using Whitman's poem, all the facts are stated (from the argument about leaves and pebbles to black holes and the expansion of the universe), then the thesis is presented and explained in relation to the supporting information.

3.a) The sentences "Should I stare at a single leaf and willingly remain ignorant of the forest? Should I be satisfied to watch the sun glinting off a single pebble and scorn any knowledge of a beach?" are rhetorical questions. The answers make up Asimov's thesis, and they clearly illustrate the ignorant aspect of Whitman's arguments.
b) Most of the essay is imagery -- all of the body paragraphs from "Those bright spots..." to "...perhaps a trillion years long" include it. Asimov's purpose is to bring others to appeal to the beauty in science, so he creates compelling images directly related to astronomy, like "quiet pock-marks of craters", "crisp and sere and vaporize into a gas of iron...", "expand and redden until they swallow up their planets", and "the whole universe is exhaling and in-haling...".
c) Metaphors, like "pulsate endlessly in a great cosmic breathing", "a wild death-scream of X-rays", and "form an enormous pinwheel", serve much the same purpose as imagery in Asimov's essay: they create beautiful, artistically appealing impressions of scientific results.
d) Personification is used to "humanize" and make artistically relevant the discoveries of science, with examples like "Some [stars] are of incomparable grandeur", "rotates about its center in a... stately turn" and "dead worlds".

[NB: Mr. Hindley, should I be specifically explaining how each example of each rhetorical device achieves the purpose I've identified, or is it okay to talk more generally?]

4. The paragraph discussing planets is well linked to the following paragraph which regards stars. A good transition is obvious from examining the introductory sentences: "Those bright spots in the sky that we call planets are worlds" and "Those other bright spots, which are stars rather than planets, are actually suns", respectively. Their topics are related through their similar appearances and the second paragraph directly refers to the first. Use of the words "bright spots", in turn, intimately connects both paragraphs to Whitman's references to stars and their beauty, a theme which threads through the whole essay. This creates cohesion in the work as a whole.