English 104: Optional Extra Credit
Due Friday, Dec 11
Instructions: You may do any two of these of these extra-credit assignments up to 10 points. You may
not earn over 10 points with these assignments. You may also do zero or one of these assignments.
Format: The diagrams and marked-up text will be handwritten. The compositions and sentences of
your own must be typed and double-spaced.
Do not plagiarize: This must be all your own work, with nothing copied, paraphrased, or summarized
from the internet. Plagiarized work will not receive credit. You’d do better to spend the time studying
for the final.
Grammar and proofreading: All sentences of your own must be carefully proofread and be
grammatically correct.
Length: Will be different for each assignment.
Option 1: (5 points) An art project based on grammar. This can be almost anything you want it to be.
You can write a sentence and diagram it and somehow turn the diagram into an art project. You can
write a sentence using some of the structures we’ve learned, and illustrate it or turn it into a grammar
comic strip. You can create a collage or graph or map of some of the grammar concepts we have
learned. If you are not sure if your idea will work, check with me about it. This assignment has to have
some thought and care put into it—it can’t be just a quick sketch such as the Dracula extra credit in
Unit 2.
Option 2: (5 points):
a. Write a sentence or two paraphrasing the meaning of the following poem—putting it into your
own words. (In understanding the poem, it might help you to know that Edward Thomas was
English, and that in 1915, most young men of England were away fighting in World War I.)
b. Diagram the poem, which is one complete sentence. Do not include the title or the author’s
name in the diagram.
In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)
by Edward Thomas
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.
Option 3: (5 points): Read the following sentence (Yes, it’s one sentence) by Joseph Mitchell, and
answer the following questions about it. It helps to know that Mitchell is writing about his wanderings
around New York City. His favorite thing to do was to walk aimlessly around the city and observe
everything he saw.
a. Make a list of some of the structures (for example, prepositional phrases, S-IV patterns, clauses
joined by coordinating conjunctions, series of prepositional phrases, modifiers joined by
coordinating conjunctions, relative clauses, etc) and quote examples (from the sentence) of
each of these.
b. Discuss how various choices for the sentence structure fit the subject matter: In what ways do
the grammatical patterns and the length of the sentence fit the content of the material? Or do
they?
c. What is a run-on sentence? Why isn’t this a run-on sentence?
Joseph Mitchell, from “Street Life” (The New Yorker, February 11 & 18, 2013)
At any hour of the day or night, I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what
is happening on scores of streets, some well known and some obscure, from one end of the
city to the other—on the upper part of Webster Avenue, up in the upper Bronx, for
example, which has a history as a dumping-out place for underworld figures who have been
taken for a ride, and which I go to every now and then because I sometimes find a weed or
a wildflower or a moss or a fern or a vine that is new to me growing along its edges or in
the cracks in its pavements, and also because there are pleasant views of the Bronx River
and of the Central and the New Haven railroad tracks on one side of it and pleasant views
of Woodlawn Cemetery on the other side of it, or on North Moore Street, down on the
lower West Side of Manhattan, which used to be lined with spice warehouses and spicegrinding mills and still has enough of them left on it to make it the most aromatic street in
the city (on ordinary days, it is so aromatic it is mildly tantalizingly and elusively exciting;
on windy days, particularly on warm, damp, windy days, it is so aromatic it is exhilarating),
or on Birmingham Street, which is a tunnel-like alley that runs for one block alongside the
Manhattan end of the Manhattan Bridge and is used by bums of the kind that Bellevue*
psychiatrists call loner winos as a place in which to sit in comparative seclusion and drink
and doze and by drug addicts and drug pushers as a place in which to come into contact
with each other and by old-timers in the neighborhood as a shortcut between Henry Street
and the streets to the south, or on Emmons Avenue, which is the principal street of
Sheepshead Bay, in Brooklyn, and along one side of which the party boats and charter boats
and bait boats of the Sheepshead Bay fishing fleet tie up, or on Beach 116th Street, which,
although only two blocks long, is the principal street of Rockaway Park, in Queens, and
from one end of which there is a stirring view of the ocean and from the other end of which
there is a stirring view of Jamaica Bay, or on Bloomingdale Road, which is the principal
street of a quiet old settlement of Negroes** called Sandy Ground down in the rural part of
Staten Island, the southernmost part of the city.
*Bellevue was a psychiatric hospital in New York City.
**This article was written sometime in the early 1960s, before the term “African-American” was in
common use.
Option 4: (5 points) Read the poem attached, “The Rocket,” by Todd Boss, which is a single complete
and perfectly grammatical sentence, and answer the following questions:
a. What is/are the subject(s) of the main clause of the poem?
b. What is the verb of the main clause of the poem?
c. Identify as many other grammatical compounds as you can (probably the best way to do this is
by marking up the poem: Prepositional phrases, relative clauses, compounds, other kinds of
clauses, verbal phrases, etc.)
d. Write a sentence or few sentences paraphrasing the meaning of the poem—putting it into your
own words.
e. Discuss why you think the author might have arranged the sentence/poem like this. Why put
the grammatical elements in this order? Why delay the main verb so long? Why end on
“swing”? Why have such a long subject? Overall, what is a theme or mood or main idea of the
poem, and how do the grammatical choices help to create that?
About quoting poetry: When you quote from the poem, use quotation marks, and insert a slash mark
( / ) between the lines to show the line breaks, like this: “in the topmost branches / of whose trees /
unseen”