The document below details some of what students need to know to prosper in Parnassus. Click on the images to return to class or home pages.

This page is maintained by Tim Jollymore at Skyline High School, Oakland, California. Please email your kind comments and questions to The Oracle at Delphi . . Copyright 2001, Tim Jollymore. Last up dated 10/6/02

Style Analysis Example

 

In Lars Eighner's Dumpster Diving , and Jamaica Kincaid's The Ugly Tourist, each author observes the world around them, and how their lives relate to it. Eighner gives an overview of the life of a homeless person who lives out of dumsters, but enjoys it thoroughly, and Kincaid gives us an overview of the tourist experience from the 'native' eye. Each essay tells its readers something about the world, in very different styles. Eighner is laid back, his writing is easy to understand. Kincaid is critical, and sometimes (at least when I am reading her) needs to be reread because of the length of her sentences.

Kincaid uses run-on sentences, quite often - long ones, but these sentences say intriguing things and paint intriguing pictures, so I forgive her the extra time it takes me to read them over a couple more times. Eighner, on the other, uses simple sentences, sentences that can be easily understood, even if they contain more than one idea. Both author's use of "to be" verbs vary between each section of the essay. Their writing is dominated by these verbs at the end of their essays, while throughout the rest of each essay, "to be" verbs are relatively balanced with action verbs. I believe this is because at the end of each essay, each author mkes statements about the way things "are," where in the rest of their essays, they are describing situations that lead to these conclusions.