This essay is a piece of descriptive writing, which well presents a picture of Vancouver and the author's view of that city. After providing a historical overview of Vancouver from Paragraph 1 to Paragraph 4, the essay then vividly describes the main parts of the city such as the Landing, Stanley Park, and Granville Island.
Description is one of the important writing styles, which is often employed to describe various persons, places, scenes, events and objects. When adopting this mode of writing, we should pay attention to the organization of the essay. Details are often organized according to time sequence or space sequence. These are two very important means of descriptive writing.
The essay can be divided into 3 parts.
Part 1 is from Paragraph 1 to Paragraph 4. This part tells us the history of Vancouver: how it developed from a piece of uninhabited land to one of the major commercial port on the Pacific. This part is organized according to chronological order. Paragraph 1 starts from the 1700s when virtually all the America's northwest coast remained unoccupied. And up to the 1770s, no one set foot there and the natives were the sole tenants of the remote forest. Paragraph 2 traces back to 1792 when the British ship captain George Vancouver passed right by the mouth of the Columbia River at Cape Disappointment, but failed to realize that the inlet was in fact the entrance to a great river. It was only a month later that an American who sailed inland on the Columbia found the piece of land, now called Vancouver. Paragraph 3 tells us that it wasn't until the 1860s that white pioneers appeared. Even in 1890, the city still remained undeveloped as one major street was just an opening slashed in the forest, with a solid wall of trees on both sides. Paragraph 4 takes us to the time later than 1890 when an American entrepreneur saw the future of Vancouver — probably the largest city of all and the greatest commercial port on the Pacific.
Part 2 is from Paragraph 5 to Paragraph 11. This part describes Vancouver in detail from the Landing, Stanley Park to Granville Island. Paragraph 5 is about the Landing, an agreeable brick shopping center, and Canada Place, which holds a convention center, a hotel, and docks where cruise ships stop. Paragraph 6 is about Stanley Park, a thousand-acre sea of green, where the original virgin forest still remains as before. Paragraph 7 is a transitional paragraph that leads reader's attention from Stanley Park to Granville Island, an urban park with unique features. Then from Paragraph 8 to Paragraph 11, we have a detailed description of Granville Island from its past to today.
Part 3 has one paragraph only: Paragraph 12. That brings out the major theme of the passage: Vancouver is a city that has risen from the forest as a good combination of a modernized city and the remains of the original virgin forest.