English 104
Extra Credit: Show Your Stuff with Verbals
Due: Tuesday, June 4
Format: Typed, double-spaced
Length: Approximately 200 words
Credit: 5 points
The idea of this exercise is to write a paragraph (only one paragraph) that narrates a story or
action or captures a person’s feelings. Do not write an entire essay; don’t worry about having a
beginning, middle, and end. Just plunge into the action or process you want to describe. Staying
within roughly 200 words will force you to compress your description, and this will help you
employ some of the syntactical structures that writers find useful in doing this—participle
phrases, appositives, appositive adjectives, nominative absolutes, relative clauses, etc. For your
first draft, you don’t need to consciously try to write these structures, just capture the action
and/or feelings as best you can. As you revise, see if any of these structures are already present in
your draft, and add more where you think they would work best.
Choose only one of the options below:
Option 1: Imagine that you want to teach a friend or relative or someone near and dear how to
do a particular task. Maybe you want to show your son how to mow the lawn. Maybe you want
to teach your cat to make you breakfast. Perhaps you want to teach a zombie how to act alive.
Write a paragraph in which you tell them how to do this task, breaking down the process into
steps and helping them understand what to do.
Option 2: Write a paragraph describing a real or imagined moment in an exciting sporting or
theatrical event. Perhaps you are the star of the moment. Perhaps someone whose heart you want
to conquer is watching. Or perhaps this moment turns out very differently than you imagined or
hoped it would.
Option 3: Cassandra and Elliot, both 21 years old, are in love. They enjoy each other’s company,
understand each other well, and want to be married to each other. However, Cassandra’s father
has forbidden his daughter to date anyone before she turns 25, so she and Elliot have been
conducting a secret relationship. They can no longer stand all the sneaking around, so Elliot has
decided to approach Cassandra’s father and ask that he reconsider his views on his daughter’s
involvement in a relationship.
Write a paragraph describing Elliot’s thoughts, feelings, and actions as he prepares to speak with
Cassandra’s father.