Analyzing Style as it Relates to Purpose

Directions Review your Style PowerPoint from the past two weeks: Four Elements of Style. LDS---literary devices, diction, syntax, and tone. Now, please read over the slides 6-19 (we have covered 3 -5)in this PowerPoint all of which exemplify fantastic writing from a variety of genres. Keeping the author’s purpose in mind, choose four slides to analyze literary devices, diction, and syntax. Print the four slides, handwrite the author’s or poet’s purpose in a complete sentence at the bottom of the paper, and do your handwritten note taking directly on the papers. Bring those marked–up slides with you tomorrow. Thanks. BP

Possession: A Romance Her face was white and sharp and slightly gleaming in the candlelight, like bone. No hint of pink. And the hair. So fine, so pale, so much, crimped by its plaiting into springy zigzag tresses, clouding neck and shoulders, shining metallic in the candlelight, catching a hint, there it was, of green again, from the reflection of a large glazed cache-pot containing a vigorous sword-leafed fern. – A. S. Byatt

Night Twenty bodies were thrown out of our wagon. Then the train resumed its journey, leaving behind it a few hundred naked dead, deprived of burial, in the deep snow of a field in Poland. » Elie Wiesel

“High Tide in Tucson” Art is the antidote that can call us back from the edge of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another. Barbara Kingsolver

Cannery Row Doc awakened very slowly and clumsily like a fat man getting out of a swimming pool. His mind broke the surface and fell back several times. – John Steinbeck

Syntax: “ President Woodrow Wilson Present an Ideal to the War Congress ” While we do these things, these deeply momentous things, let us be very clear, and make very clear to all the world, what our motives and our objects are. Woodrow Wilson

Of Mice and Men But George sat stiffly on the bank and looked at his right hand that had thrown the gun away. John Steinbeck

The House on Mango Street When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees. Sandra Cisneros

Brave New World He had been prepared to lie, to bluster, to remain sullenly unresponsive, but, reassured by the good-humored intelligence of the Controller’s face, he decided to tell the truth, straightforwardly. Aldous Huxley

“ I Hear an Army Changing Upon the Land ” I hear an army changing upon the land, And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees: Arrogant, in black armor, behind them stand, Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers. James Joyce

The Sound and the Fury I slowed still more, my shadow pacing me, dragging its head through the weeds that hid the fence. William Faulkner

“ The Black Cat ” No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, then I was answered by a voice from within the tomb! - by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman - a howl! - a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation. Edgar Allan Poe

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Pots rattled in the kitchen where Momma was frying corn cakes to go with vegetable soup for supper; and the homey sounds and scents cushioned me as I read of Jane Eyre in the cold English mansion of a colder English gentleman. » Maya Angelou

Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines …then Satan first knew pain, And writh’d him to and fro convolv’d; so sore The grinding sword with discontinuous wound Passed through him. John Milton

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Newts are the most common of salamanders. Their skin is a lighted green, like water in a sunlit pond, and rows of very right red dots line their backs. They have gills as larvae; as they grow they turn a luminescent red, lose their gills, and walk out of the water to spend a few years padding around in damp places on the forest floor. Their feet look like fingered baby hands, and they walk in the same leg patterns as all four-footed creatures - dogs, mules, and, for that matter, lesser pandas. Annie Dillard

Diction: “Sailing to Byzantium” An aged man is but a paltry thing / A tattered coat upon a stick…. W. B. Yeats