A periodic sentence “builds toward and ends
with the main clause.” (LOC, Glossary, Shea et al., Eds.) For example: Arching his back, his white teeth sparkling, his tail
curled low between his legs, my cat scowled at the little dog.
For
Friday, March 28:
Compose imitations of each of the following five (5) periodic
sentences, just as you did for five cumulative sentences on Wednesday. Choose your own subject, even as you maintain
the syntax of the original.
1. ““To believe your own thought, to
believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,
that is genius.”
~ from “Self-Reliance,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1841).
Imitation:
2. "For
the sake of the children, for the Republic in which these children will vote
after we are dead, and for the sake of our cause, we should enlist the
workingmen voters, with us, in this task of freeing the children from
toil!"
~ from Florence Kelley’s Speech to the Philadelphia
Suffragettes (1905).
Imitation:
3. “Full of his beliefs, sustained and
elevated by the power of his purpose, armed with the rules of grammar, the
writer is ready for exposure.”
~ from The
Elements of Style, by E.B. White (1918).
Imitation:
4. In that instant, in too short a time, one would
have thought, even for a bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant.
~ from
"Shooting an Elephant," by George Orwell (1936).
Imitation:
5. “In the week before their departure to
Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable
frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy....”
~ from Dune,
by Frank Herbert (1965).
Imitation:
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