1. “Hills Like White Elephants”
Ernest Hemingway
1927

2. What is this story about?
In your groups, come up with a few ideas that can be supported with text.

3. Ideas…

4. Now, which idea is best?
Meet back in your groups and, using textual evidence, come to some conclusion as to which idea is best.

5. Dialect vs. Dialogue

6. Dialect
a form of a language spoken in a particular geographical area or by members of a particular social class, distinguished by its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation

7. Examples “Yes’m” “Now ain’t you ashamed of yourself?”
“Ain’t you got nobody home to tell you to wash your face?”
“because shoes come by develish like that will burn your feet.”

8. Why would an author choose to use a dialect for a character?

9. Dialogue
the conversation between two or more characters in a piece of writing.

10. What is the purpose of well-written dialogue?

11. Purpose of good dialogue
Provide Information
Describe a Place or Character
Create a Sense of Time
Create Suspense or Conflict
Move the Story Forward
Reveal a Character's Thoughts
Summarize What Has Happened
Create a Sense of Place

12. How to Punctuate Dialogue
“Sure, it’ll work. It always works.”
“I’ll bet I can,” the boy said.
“Yes,” I said. “It is wonderful here, isn’t it.”
“First,” he said, “we’ave a little Martini.”

13. “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader…will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer has stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” -Hemingway

14. How do we see this iceberg idea in the story?
What are advantages to using this type of writing?
What are some disadvantages?

15. How is the theory of the iceberg applicable to your own life
How is the theory of the iceberg applicable to your own life? When have you experienced it? Describe.

16. What comes to mind when you think of a white elephant?

17. From Wikipedia…
The tradition…associate[s] a white elephant with the birth of the Buddha, as his mother was reputed to have dreamed of a white elephant…on the eve of giving birth. Because the animals were considered sacred and laws protected them from labor, receiving a gift of a white elephant from a monarch was simultaneously a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because the animal was sacred and a sign of the monarch's favor, and a curse because the recipient now had an expensive- to-maintain animal he could not give away and could not put to much practical use.

18. Now, we will reread the story.
Pay attention to dialogue and patterns. Note them in your annotations.

19. Characterization
The American
The Girl (Jig)

20. What patterns did you recognize?