Language Arts Lesson 6
Writing Strategies: Organization and Focus (Grades 9-12)

Problems

  Answer Key

Problems 6-1  (click HERE for a printer-friendly version)

Directions: Complete the problems below. Consult the Answer Key below for answers once you finish. Review the Instruction material which relates to any questions you do not get correct.

Rewrite the following sentences. Change the passive verbs to active.

1. An unexpected tornado smashed several homes and uprooted trees in a suburb of Knoxville.
    
2. I was surprised by the teacher's lack of sympathy.
    
3. "The Yellow Wallpaper" was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
    
4. Participants in the survey were asked about their changes in political affiliation.
    
5. Tall buildings and mountain roads were avoided by Raoul because he had such a fear of heights.

Identify the rhetorical devices used in these sentences.

6. So I sit in wonder of my sleeping bride, in praise of her, in prayer for her, and in love with her after all these years." "Don't tell us petty stories of our own pettiness. We have enough little Harvard men to do that. Tell us of things new and strange and novel as you used to do. Tell us of love and war and action that thrills us because we know it not, of boundless freedom that delights us because we have it not. . . . Go back where there are temples and jungles and all manner of unknown things, where there are mountains whose summits have never been scaled, rivers whose sources have never been reached, deserts whose sands have never been crossed." (Willa Cather) [Advice to Rudyard Kipling, who was living in Vermont]
    
7. "All that we see or seem/is but a dream within a dream." (E.A. Poe)
    
8. "What I understand by `philosopher': a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger." (Friedrich Nietzsche)
    
9. "One man who has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't." (George Bernard Shaw)
    
10. "Oh, my God. It's exploded. Fire is raining down on those gathered to watch this historic docking. I see people clinging to the mooring ropes and trying to slide to safety as fire races toward them. People are running out of the fiery inferno. Oh, the humanity, the humanity." (Radio news reporter, on the Hindenberg disaster, 1937)
     
11. You're sorry, for one foolish flicker-flash in the long, dull fall of eternity? You're sorry? I'm un-impressed.
     
12. "A national plan to provide healing for all. Why didn't we think of that?" (Kenneth Cole)
    "What happens to a dream deferred? . . . does it lay there like a raisin in the sun, or does it fester like an open sore?" (with apologies to Langston Hughes for the paraphrasing)
     
13. "To the swinging and the ringing
    Of the bells, bells, bells--
    Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
    Bells, bells, bells --"
    ("The Bells," E. A. Poe)
     
14. "We loved with a love that was more than love,
    I and my Annabel Lee;
    With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven coveted her and me." (Poe)
     
15. "Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee." (Poe)

Answer Key (click HERE for a printer-friendly version) (top

1. This sentence is already in the active voice.
    
2. The teacher's lack of sympathy surprised me.
    
3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper."
    
4. There's nothing wrong with the passive construction in this sentence.
    
5. Raoul avoided tall buildings and mountain roads because he had such a fear of heights.
    
6. climax/copia 
    
7. diacope
    
8. dialectic
    
9. ellipsis
    
10. energia
     
11. erotesis/epimone
     
12. epiplexis
     
13. epizeuxis 
     
14. epimone/exergasia
     
15. homoioteleuton