The Puzzle of Appraising is a solemn poetic form intended to describe a specific wilderness region, originating in The Race of Speech. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is two eleven-line stanzas. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often contrast underlying meaning. Each line has seven syllables. The seventh line of each stanza shares the underlying meaning of the fifth line. The third line of each stanza has the same grammatical structure as the first line. The ninth line of each stanza must expand the idea of the first line. The rhyme scheme of the poem is ABAACACCABC.