Iain Crichton Smith's style of writing is very descriptive. He's taken great care over his choice of words, and this gives his writing clarity. He uses adjectives and adverbs to provide specific details, and figures of speech to create vivid imagery. When you're writing about the way language is used in the book, you'll have to address these aspects of the author's style and the effect they have. To help you feel more confident talking and writing about language, try the following exercise.

Read the following extract from Chapter 9. Then click on the underlined parts of the text to examine the use of language more closely. If you don't understand some of the terms used, remember you can look them up in the toolbox.

Seen from above she was a diminutive figure in black plodding steadily across the moor alive with yellow and wine-red, her shoes sinking into the moist earth. To the south of her there rose gently lazy smoke from the village, a thin blue into a bluer sky. In the distance she could hear someone hammering, perhaps repairing a fence. But she was alone on the moor. Not quite alone, for she came suddenly upon an object which at first she took to be a piece of dirty cloth. As she approached it she could hear a thick buzzing sound which puzzled her, a buzzing as of a great number of flies, almost like the sound of a sleepy saw sawing fresh wood. When she came to the object she looked down and almost turned away with disgust and sickness. It was the carcass of a thin sheep, soiled white with a black head, one of the Highland sheep of which people owned one or two. But nevertheless she stayed there for a while, fascinated with feelings of revulsion and pity. The sheep stared up at her, both its sockets empty and yet liquid as if with tears. The crows could have done that and indeed as she looked she saw a crow some yards off, staring at her stonily with fixed eyes as if there was real intelligence behind them. There was a gash in the sheep's side at which the flies were buzzing in a domestic sort of way. In fact it all looked very homely. The buzzing reminded her of the humming of Sunday pots on boil.