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Learning how to
talk about style, cadence, diction, and more
Passage #1:
He was a man past middle age, who with nothing to start
with but sound health and a certain grim and puritanical affinity for
abstinence and endurance had made a fair farm out of the barren scrap of
hill land which he had bought at less than a dollar and acre and married and
raised a family on it and fed and clothed them all and even educated them
after a fashion, taught them at least hard work, so that as soon as they
became big enough to resist him, boys and girls too, they left home *one was
a professional nurse, one a prostitute; the oldest had simply vanished
completely) so that there now remained the small neat farm which likewise
had been worked to the point of mute and unflagging mutual hatred and
resistance but which could not leave him and so far had not been able to
eject him but which possibly knew that it could and would outlast him, and
his wife who possibly had the same, perhaps not, hope for resisting, but
maybe staff and prop for bearing and enduring.
W. Faulkner
Passage #2:
He would not think about that. That was not his
business. That was Golz’s business. He had only one thing to do and that
was what he should think about and he must think it out clearly and take
everything as it came along, and not worry. To worry was as bad as to be
afraid. It simply made things more difficult… Think about them being away,
he said. Think about them going through the timber. Think about them
crossing a creek. Think about them riding through the heather. Think about
them going up the slope. Think about them O.K. tonight. Think about them
traveling, all night. Think about them hiding up tomorrow. Think about
them. God damn it, think about them. That’s just as far as I can think
about them, he said.
E. Hemingway |