“Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.”
What feelings are evoked by the word
thud
?
How would the meaning change if the speaker let the door
slam
shut?
Write down five different verbs which express the closing of a door and a specific feeling that each verb evokes.
“Twenty bodies were thrown out of our wagon. Then the train resumed its journey, leaving behind it a few hundred naked dead, deprived of burial, in the deep snow of a field in Poland.”
In this selection, Wiesel never refers to the men who die on the journey as men. He refers to them as
bodies
or simply
dead
. How does his diction shape the reader’s understanding of the horror?
How would the meaning change if we substituted
dead people
for
bodies?
Change the italicized word in the sample sentence to a word that disassociates the reader from the true action of the sentence.
Fifteen chickens were
slaughtered
for the feast.
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