AP English Lit & Comp
Mrs. Nora/Mrs. Szabo 2012-2013
DIRECTIONS FOR SENTENCE IMITATIONS
“And who could have asked for better teachers [than the masters]: generous, uncritical, blessed with
wisdom and genius, as endlessly forgiving as only the dead can be?”
--Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
The English language offers a wealth of syntactical patterns. A writer chooses
different styles to emphasize an idea to the reader, to startle the reader, or to entice the
reader into his/her way of thinking, among other things.
For this assignment, we will first analyze that week’s sentence. What kind of
sentence is it? What is the main idea? Is the main idea up front, is it buried in the middle,
or does it bring up the end? Why? What is the effect? What is the level of diction? What
kind of imagery do you find? What is the tone and how does the author achieve it? For
the first five weeks, we will complete the analysis together. After that, you will be on your
own.
Secondly, you will imitate the sentence. You do not need word for word
correspondence, but you should include the same kind, number, and order of clauses and
phrases. Try to imitate the tone of the original. Is it funny? Ironic? Angry? Neutral?
Your topic does not need to be the same as the original, but it must make sense. If
you just substitute a verb for a verb, a noun for a noun, and so on, you will likely end up
with gibberish.
Please type the original, your analysis, and your imitation. This assignment will be
due every Friday. It is worth ten points: five for analysis, five for imitation. Minus one
point if you fail to type original sentence. Half credit if it is submitted after class.
1. Close by the fire sat an old man whose countenance was furrowed with distress.
Boswell’s London Journal, James Boswell
2. The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other
side of Lake Superior at three o’clock. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
3. The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring,
inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude.
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
4. In seven canonical words, she exhorts, cajoles, commands someone—herself? me?—to
carry on the fight, to be a credit to the family, to strive onward to the goal.
Obasan, Joy Kogawa
5. Pangle reached a hand out of his sleeve and turned it palm up to the elements and then
fisted it and drew it back in as a turtle its head.
Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
AP English Lit & Comp
Mrs. Nora/Mrs. Szabo 2012-2013
6. Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they
cannot become conscious.
1984, George Orwell
7. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune
must be in want of a wife.
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
8. How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads, to whom sleep is a
blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.
Dracula, Bram Stoker
9. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts
of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover
that I had not lived.
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
10. In the soft gray silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there
through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of
water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
11. Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons
attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it
will be shot.
Introduction to Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
12. 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. [Yes, this is two sentences.]
Night, Elie Wiesel
13. And over the continents, over the ragged carpet of Russia, over North America and South
America kissing at the Panama Canal, over the Great Wall of China and the gigantic bean
that was Australia, over the silence of Antarctica, flew swarms of fighters, their small
weapons glinting in the beams of the indifferent sun.
Things Invisible to See, Nancy Willard
AP English Lit & Comp
Mrs. Nora/Mrs. Szabo 2012-2013
14. In the first place, it was impossible to keep up with her unless she waited for them—for
she could move on all fours or even wriggle like a snake almost as quickly as they could
walk—and in the second place she was an accomplished soldier, which they were not.
The Once and Future King, T. H. White
15. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a
reverie of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to
follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of
poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all
faiths in man shaken…
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
16. If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to
the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I
would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men;
and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing
my nose at You Know Who.
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
17. By this time the report of the accident had spread among the workmen and boatmen
about the Cobb, and many were collected near them, to be useful if wanted; at any rate, to
enjoy the sight of a dead young lady, nay, two dead young ladies, for it proved twice as
fine as the first report.
Persuasion, Jane Austen
18. Under the hard, tough cloak of the struggle for existence in which money and enormous
white refrigerators and shining, massive, brutally-fast cars and fine, expensive clothing
had ostensibly overwhelmed the qualities of men that were good and gentle and just,
there still beat a heart of kindness and patience and forgiveness.
No-No Boy, John Okada
19. It was an odd thing that ever since that hot and crowded night in the cell he had passed
into a region of abandonment--almost as if he had died there with the old man's hand on
his shoulder and now wandered in a kind of limbo, because he wasn't good or bad
enough.
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
AP English Lit & Comp
Mrs. Nora/Mrs. Szabo 2012-2013
20. People think that professional soldiers think a lot about fighting, but serious professional
soldiers think a lot more about food and a warm place to sleep, because these are two
things that are generally hard to get, whereas fighting tends to turn up all the time.
Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
21. The room, Midge's taste, for Thomas was unconscious of his surroundings, was brilliant
with flowers, upon the curtains, upon the wallpaper, upon the oriental carpet, even in
plaster wreaths upon the ceiling, as well as serenely and more ephemerally present in jugs
and vases.
The Good Apprentice, Iris Murdoch
22. Later, when he considered this night—and he would think of it often, in the months and
years to come; the turning point of his life, the moments around which everything else
would always gather--what he remembered was the silence in the room and the snow
falling steadily outside.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Kim Edwards
23. In the provinces he had an affair with one of the ladies who threw themselves at the chic
young lawyer; there was also a milliner: there were drinking bouts with visiting aides-decamp and after-supper trips to a certain street on the outskirts of town; there were also
attempts to curry favor with his chief and even with his chief’s wife.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
24. The graces of writing and conversation are of different kinds, and though he who excels
in one might have been with opportunities and application equally successful in the other,
yet as many please by extemporary talk, though utterly unacquainted with the more
accurate method and more labored beauties which composition requires; so it is very
possible that men, wholly accustomed to works of study, may be without that readiness of
conception and affluence of language, always necessary to colloquial entertainment.
“An Author’s Writing and Conversation Contrasted,” Samuel Johnson
25. But some of the machinery would be left, since new pieces could always be bought on
the installment plan—gaunt, staring, motionless wheels rising from mounds of brick
rubble and ragged weeds with a quality profoundly astonishing, and gutted boilers lifting
their rusting and unsmoking stacks with an air stubborn, baffled and bemused upon a
stumppocked scene of profound and peaceful desolation, unplowed, untilled, gutting
slowly into red and choked ravines.
Light in August, William Faulkner