English 134
24 January 2012 The Man Behind the Camo, by Kelly McBride, is a profile that focuses on the author’s younger brother, Scott, and his experiences with the concept of manhood. McBride goes about this by describing past events like childhood traditions and activities that she shared with Scott, and then providing her own commentary and thoughts on the matter. McBride’s detailed recounting of her personal experiences helps make this piece a well-written profile because it effectively gives the reader insight into Scott’s childhood as well as their relationship as brother and sister. This firsthand source (memories written onto paper) helps the reader to feel as if they were really there, and makes them more aware of what the actual events were like and how they helped McBride come to the conclusions that she did about Scott and masculinity. The author uses both quotes and detailed imagery to portray her brother in this profile, a combination that both appeals to the senses and works very well to describe events. McBride uses quotes to emphasize or confirm the memory that she is currently describing, which helps to lend the reader a hand and give them a real example of the subject while helping to align the author’s train of thought and the story. For example, when McBride is recalling Scott’s first venture into manhood in the form of football she quotes him saying “’All of my friends were doing it that year. Football is just kind of the ‘guy’ thing to do.’”(McBride 16). This quote fully gives light to Scott’s masculinity adventure while connecting McBride’s musings about manhood to Scott’s actual life. When McBride writes about how Scott turned to

hunting when he was injured in football, she quotes her brother again to support the masculinity theme of the paper. He says: “’I would say I became a man either when I started hunting or when I broke my leg’” (McBride 16). This direct statement from Scott confirms that he is indeed thinking about masculinity a lot and that it is very important to him. Again, it connects the author’s focus to a particular point in her and Scott’s childhood. Another way that McBride successfully portrays her brother is by using specific details and imagery, which tie into and relate to the quotes and general description of the plot. What would any piece of art be without details? The answer is extremely bland, and that is the opposite of McBride’s profile. She recounts personal experiences and then augments them with adjectives and descriptions that give life to her words and give us more than just the bare minimum or the facts. When talking about going on a duck hunt with Scott, she writes “Mud. Grime. Swamp. Brush. Brown water. To most people the marsh is nothing but a repulsive wasteland, but to my brother it is a haven” (McBride 15). Words and sentences like these are the ones that make good stories, as they take the reader into the setting. McBride follows a stream of enlightening adjectives with a sentence that compares two different views of the marsh, which really helps to show what the author was experiencing at the time. Descriptive tools like these are essential to a good profile because at the end of the piece you want your readers to have at least gotten to know the subject a little bit, and personal experiences combined with details and imagery made that happen nicely in this profile. McBride uses both quotes and detailed imagery when she recounts her personal experiences, and this helps make her profile effective because it gives the reader a better

awareness of Scott’s childhood, their relationship as brother and sister, and Scott’s experiences with manhood. This piece is both entertaining and shows us who Scott is, thanks to McBride’s personal experiences.