Reference no: EM133317130

Identify the Structure of a Paragraph

Take the paragraph below and apply the terms offered in this chapter (especially from page 255) to describe what various sentences do. Look for coordinate versus subordinate structures, but more specifically, label the mental moves performed by individual sentences. We have numbered the sentences to make the paragraph easier to work with.

Question 1. White might not have succeeded in completely ridding his life of modern civilization, but Strunk's manual in White's hands became a successful primitivist tract. Thesis Statement

Question 2. Perhaps that seems like an overstatement, but in fact what counts as primitivist is flexible, Marianna Torgovnick reminded us, entirely dependent on what bugs one about the modern. ExP

Question 3. The key feature of primitivism, Torgovnick offered, is defining the primitive in reaction to the present: "Is the present too majestic? Primitive life is not-it is a precapitalist utopia in which only use value, never exchange value, prevails. Is the present sexually repressed? Not primitive life-primitives live life whole, without fear of the body" (8). Transitional Wording

Question 4. For Strunk and White, modern life was verbose and obscure, so primitive life must be brief, direct, and clear. SW

Question 5. New things are bad things, new words the worst of all. T

Question 6. The words offputting and ongoing appear in the third and subsequent editions of The Elements of Style "newfound adjectives, to be avoided because they are inexact and clumsy" (Third Edition 54). Illustration

Question 7. The suffix oriented is lambasted as "a clumsy, pretentious device, much in vogue" (Third Edition 55). Illustrations

Question 8. The Elements of Style thus had become, over a period of nearly unprecedented technological progress, the perfect complement to the manual typewriter - a deliberate rejection of "books with permissive steering and automatic transitions" that made our live easier but rendered our prose impotent and our character lax (xvi).

paraphrasing

Question 9. For impotence and laxity, The Elements of Style offers a program of stylistic and moral restitution, word by word.