AUGUST I can edit sentences for mistakes in comma usage. I can demonstrate comprehension by answering literal, interpretive, and evaluative questions. I can apply my knowledge of the denotation of words. I can analyze a writer’s diction and its effect on tone.

COMMAS IN A SERIES, WITH COORDINATING CONJUNCTIONS, AND WITH INTRODUCTORY ELEMENTS.  We could order a sandwich macaroni and cheese or soup.  We swam laps in the cool refreshing pool.  After that we exercised with free weights stationary bicycles and rowing machines.  We had an interminable hectic tiring day.  We went to the post office, because we had to mail our electric bill.

VOCABULARY PRACTICE— ON WHITE BOARDS  Scout and Jem first believed that Boo was a malevolent person, but after he left them gum, soap dolls, and saved their lives, they realized he was actually.  It is easy to get Ms. Botts sidetracked; just ask her to tell an so her stories get her off track.  In order to make an A on the vocabulary test, you must (add –ly to the word) study your words and participate in the reviews in class.  Atticus Finch is a man of ; he refused to let Maycomb believe Bob Ewell’s lie that a crippled African American raped his daughter.  What are two pairs of synonyms?  Which words are antonyms?

DICTION, TONE, AND FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE ON THE SCRATCH PAPER Identify the euphemism in the following excerpt. What effect does the euphemism have on the writer’s tone? “…but, unfortunately, little is known of her beyond the fact that Petrovich had a wife, who wears a cap and a dress; but she cannot lay claim to beauty, it seems—at least, no one but the soldiers of the guard, as they pulled their mustaches, and uttered some peculiar sound, even looked under her cap when they met her” (84). Now try to imitate Gogol’s style and tone. Write a sentence about Ms. Botts’s English class that uses a euphemism and expresses the same tone as Gogol’s.

1. WHAT KIND OF FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE IS USED IN THE TEXT? HOW DOES IT IMPACT THE READER? 2. WHAT KIND OF FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE IS USED IN THE UNDERLINED PORTION? “The young officials laughed at and made fun of him, so far as their official wit permitted; recounted there in his presence various stories concocted about him, and about his landlady, an old woman of seventy; they said that she beat him; asked when the wedding was to be; and strewed bits of paper over his head, calling them snow. But Akakii Akakievich answered not a word, as though there had been no one before him. It had no effect upon his employment: amid all these molestations, he never made a single mistake in a letter” (Gogol 81).