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

This sentence is short in order to make the relevation appear more straighforward. The components are stripped to the bare minium: subject, verb and adjective then the second clause after the interjection “by” includes a similiarly structured ending with a verb and the same adjective. The communicates that the fromer state (kind) can be achieved by “being” kind. Often, such quotes will alter one part of the sentence. In this case, changing the verb to the continous form from the present communicates that becoming kind is a continous effort.

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

This is a long sentence, where many verbs communicating how “they” are moving are conected using multiple “and” conjuctions. This is called polysyndeton, the effect is emphasis on the various methods of movement. There is a second part of the sentence that breaks this “… and were carried, finally, home.” This abrupty breaks the progression of the sentence, finally is between commas, causing the reader to stop. The effect is that the syntax signifies that the movement in the previous part has now ceased, since the pace at which the sentence is read also pauses.

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

Kennedy’s speech has the characteristic of including long sentences using parallelism and anaphora. Here, he uses similar beginings of each clause with the verb “finished” followed by a specific timeframe. The constructions are parallel to that of the first sentence. Furthmore, the use of polysyndeton with “nor” connections the parallel sentences into a long sentence. The shorter sentence “But let us begin.” stops the parallelism and puts the reader’s attention on the meaning of those words. The sentence begins with “But”, signifying it is referring to the previous sentence, but seperating this comment thusly signifies a transition, signifiying that the audience needs to think about the present. Therefore, the tense changed to present whereas before it was the future tense.

But George at stiffly on the bank and looked at his right hand that had thrown the gun away

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

The subordinate clause, that had thrown the gun away, is used as an adjective to modify the word hand. What effect does this have on the meaning of the sentence?

Compare Steinbeck’s sentence with the following:

George, who had thrown the gun away, sat stiffly on the bank and looked at his right hand.

Both sentences have subordinate clauses that modify nouns, but the clauses modify different nouns. Discuss the effect of the nouns in the different subordinate clauses.

Write a subordinate clause that completes the following sentences:

Sarah gazed at the road and thought about her plans.

Your clause should modify the word plans and give meaning to the sentence

No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, then I was answered by a voice from within the tomb! - by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman - a howl! - a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat

The dashes on the long sentence set off a series of appositives. What noun phrase is explained by the appositives?

The phrase about the voice within the tomb are explained using appositives.

This sentence makes syntactic and semantic sense if it ends with the exclamation point. What do the appositives add to the meaning and effectiveness of the sentence?

This extract is from a horror story. The part with the exclamation point is meant to elicit surprise. The appositives add to the meaning and the effectiveness because it changes the tone from that of surprise to dread. The appositives add chilling descriptions of the nature of the cry from within the tomb. The added meaning is descriptive, but because of the appositives and language it also reveals the state of the speaker’s mind.