English 104: Optional Extra Credit
Due Friday 3/21
Instructions: You may any two of these extra-credit assignments. Do not do more than two. You may
also do one or none.
Format: The diagrams will be handwritten. The compositions and sentences of your own must be
typed.
Warning against plagiarism: 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.
Option 1: (3 points): This assignment has several steps.
Step one: Look at the two sentence diagram templates below, and compose two sentences of
your own which fit the diagrams exactly.
Step two: Walk around campus with your sentences and the diagram templates, and find the
two sentences on campus that fit the diagrams. They are posted next to each other, one after the
other, just as they are in the diagram.
Step three: Fill in the diagram templates with these two found sentences. They should fit
exactly.
Step four: Turn in your composed sentences and your diagrams of the found sentences.
The diagrams are not here: pick up a paper copy in class.
Option 2: (3 points): Diagram the following poem, which is one complete sentence. Additionally,
write a sentence or two of your own paraphrasing the meaning of the poem (putting it in your own
words). Hint for diagramming: it might help you to write the poem out in one line, like a sentence. Hint
for understanding the meaning: It will help you to know that Edward Thomas was English, and to
know what was happening in Europe in 1915. 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: (3 points): Read the following poem by William Shakespeare, and answer the following
questions about it.
a.
b.
c.
d.
What is the poem saying, overall? In one or two sentences of your own, paraphrase the poem.
What is the main clause of the material before the semi-colon?
What is the effect of delaying the main clause for that long?
What is the effect of having such a comparatively short sentence after the semi-colon?
Sonnet 29
William Shakespeare
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Option 4: (3 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.
Questions:
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 obsure, 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.