ENGLISH BLOG EXERCISES

Complete the following exercises in your English blog:

Analyse the writers’ use of passive verb construction and repetition in the following examples (italics mine):

1A) We are made kind by being kind.
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, 77

1B) They sailed and trailed and flew and raced and crawled and walked and were carried, finally, home.
John Knowles, Indian Summer, 4

2) Analyse the speaker’s use of parallelism and sentence length in the following example:

All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.
John F. Kennedy, Inaugural address, January 20, 1961

3) Find an online advertisement containing visuals and 2-5 sentences. Copy the copy (see definition #3 here) to your blog and add a hyperlink to the full advertisement. Answer the following guiding question in 300 - 500 words:

How is syntax used to persuade the reader?

1A) we are made kind by being kind.
A passive verb construction contains a type of verb to be as well as a past participle of a transitive verb. It expresses action that is carried out on the subject of the sentence, which in this case is 'kind'. The use of repetition is used to express the type of emphasis there is. The passive very construction ensures to get the readers attention by applying a type of direct word, kind. The sentence also refers to someone who is made kind by being kind, which is an imperative that is used to grab the readers attention.

1B) In one b, there is no specific repetition, however the use of (ed) at the end of each word that is a verb, ensures for a rhyme and a similar toned verb. To add on, the use of passive verb construction is seen through the use of sailed, trailed, crawled and walked, which are used as transitive verbs in order to make them sound similar.

2) Parallelism is the repetition of the same grammatical form in two or more parts of a sentence. In this case 2 sentenced from different parts use the parallelism, the only word that is different is the hundred and thousand. The sentence length in both of separate sentences is very similar.