Week 8: Week 8 — Style I: Syntax and Imitation
Week of Mon, Oct 26 · week closes Sun, Nov 1
This week's items
Exact due times are in Canvas. Late work accepted at 10% per day; assessed work not accepted late. Vocabulary quizzes are unannounced and cannot be made up.
Know these cold
- An appositive phrase renames or identifies a nearby noun. 'My teacher, a three-decade classroom veteran, opened with a question.' The appositive adds information without a separate sentence.
- A participial phrase begins with a participle (-ing or -ed verb form) and modifies a noun. 'Turning toward the window, she described what she saw.' Misplace it and you create a dangling modifier.
- A periodic sentence withholds the main clause until the end, building anticipation: 'For all the years of practice, for all the sacrifice and discipline, he finished second.' The emphasis falls on the final word.
- A cumulative sentence places the main clause first, then adds modifying phrases: 'She wrote, pen moving across the page, filling margin after margin, aware only of what she still had to say.'
- Parallelism requires that items in a series share the same grammatical form. 'She was intelligent, determined, and had ambition' breaks parallelism; 'intelligent, determined, and ambitious' maintains it.
- Anaphora repeats a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or sentences: 'We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields.' The repetition creates rhythm and accumulates force.
- Antithesis places contrasting ideas in parallel grammatical structures: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.' The contrast is sharpened by the symmetry.
- Subordination joins a dependent clause to a main clause, showing logical relationship (cause, condition, time, contrast). Overusing coordination (and, but, so) produces a flat, childlike style.
- Sentence imitation: copy the exact syntactic structure of a model sentence while using entirely different content. This builds range you cannot get by reading alone.
Meerk's quiz — open the Week 8 gate
10 questions, no time limit. 85% on your first attempt in a 24-hour window opens the gate. Retakes inside the window are practice — they help you learn, they don't count. Work alone; the point is to know it, not to have seen it.
Dinner Table Question
Ask at home: If you change the structure of a sentence without changing any of its words, does its meaning change?
En español: Si cambias la estructura de una oración sin cambiar ninguna de sus palabras, ¿cambia su significado?