Using your notes, write a response to the following. Both authors, Verlyn Klinkenborg and Andrew McCarthy, seek out first-hand experience to get a taste of dog running and to help them understand what it is about dog running that makes people love it. Using both texts, answer the question: What makes people love the sport of dog sledding? Use textual evidence from both texts to support your response.
To write your response, follow these steps:
- Refer to your annotated texts. You can find one in the “Reading Two Texts” section of this lesson. The other is in the first graphic organizer you completed.
- Then, review your answers to the graphic organizer you completed in Section 4.
- Write your response.
- When you are finished, check your understanding to see a possible response.
Check Your Understanding
Sample Response:
Both Verlyn Klinkenborg, the author of “Why Do Sled Dogs Run?”, and Andrew McCarthy, the author of “Racing (Briefly) Along the Iditarod Trail,” travel north to learn first–hand what it’s like to drive a dog sled. Although they both have an admiration for the drivers and the dogs, they have different ideas about what makes people love dog racing. Klinkenborg focuses more on the behavior of the dogs and the miraculous way that the dogs run as if running itself was the reward for running. McCarthy also comments on the relationship with the dogs, but he notes the skills necessary to be a musher and the pleasures of feeling like a real musher even when he “wipes out.” Both of the writers come away from the experience with an appreciation of the stamina of the dogs and the skill of the mushers.
Both Verlyn Klinkenborg, the author of “Why Do Sled Dogs Run?”, and Andrew McCarthy, the author of “Racing (Briefly) Along the Iditarod Trail,” travel north to learn first–hand what it’s like to drive a dog sled. Although they both have an admiration for the drivers and the dogs, they have different ideas about what makes people love dog racing. Klinkenborg focuses more on the behavior of the dogs and the miraculous way that the dogs run as if running itself was the reward for running. McCarthy also comments on the relationship with the dogs, but he notes the skills necessary to be a musher and the pleasures of feeling like a real musher even when he “wipes out.” Both of the writers come away from the experience with an appreciation of the stamina of the dogs and the skill of the mushers.