Category: Writing

Knowing that corruptions and other major crimes are rampantly happening, as a learner you are given the chance to critique the bill that allows Death Penalty. What will your criticism be and why?

Respond to the following prompts:
1. Which argument made the strongest case for the proposal for the Universal Basic Income? Summarize one reason supporting your evaluation of the rhetoric.  (2-3 sentences)
THE CASE AGAINST UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME
GEORGE ZARKADAKIS
Universal Basic Income (UBI) suggests that all adults should receive the same minimum, guaranteed, income from the State irrespective of their other incomes. It is being put forward as the “solution” to the obliteration of jobs due to robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. In a future, when work will be intermittent or absent, UBI could provide safety net and replace the current, complex welfare systems—or so its advocates claim.
UBI is not a novel idea. Thomas Paine first proposed it in the late 19th century, when he suggested that big landowners should be taxed and the dividends redistributed to every young man in America. Paine’s economic argument rested on the idea of “rent”: the owners of producing assets gain from the work of those who use these assets to produce goods and services. This gain is a rent because the owners do not participate in production. It is rather significant that the business models of the big high-tech companies in the modern digital economy are founded on rent. Think of digital platforms, or the cloud, or XaaS (“everything as a service”) models. In a highly automated economy the owners of the automating technology will be akin to the Paine’s big landowners. So why not tax them and redistribute the money to the rest of us?
There are several arguments against this, and I would like to separate them in three categories: economic, political, and ethical. Let’s start with economics. In a globalized economy capital is free to move to the lowest cost. In the absence of a world government that can enforce a tax regime on every country, the practicality of taxing the cash reserves of fully automated companies—as suggested by Thomas Piketty among others—is a moot point. Besides, such a tax would impact on those companies’ ability to invest and innovate, which could result in losing their competitiveness. In such a scenario companies operating from low or zero tax regimes would win. By curbing innovation in their jurisdictions governments of today’s advanced economies will also lose from the productivity dividend that automation is expected to deliver. Accordingly to a recent report by Accenture and Frontier Economics intelligent machines will raise the annual growth rate of gross value added (a close approximation of GDP) by 4.6 percent in US, 3.9 percent in UK, and 2.7 percent in Japan. Governments may like UBI because it is the sword that can cut through the messy Gordian knot of their welfare systems, which are generating generational poverty rather than helping anyone. But going for UBI may have adverse effects both on tax receipts as well as in losing the battle of the fourth industrial revolution to low tax competitors.
Politics comes into play as well. It is curious that big high-tech companies in Silicon Valley are such fervent supporters of UBI. Perhaps they are fearful of replacing the bankers as the most-hated capitalist villains, or maybe they want to pass the bucket to governments and relieve themselves of the responsibility of destroying the livelihoods of many.Nevertheless, many of those companies would be happy to contribute some of their vast wealth to fund UBI, for this will allow them to have much greater leverage on government decisions. There has been a tug of war between high-tech companies and energy companies for who will have the greatest influence over government—for quite a while—and UBI seems to be fast becoming the new front line. While Bill Gates suggests a “robot tax” and Elon Musk advocates UBI, a conservative think tank led by notable republicans such as James Baker and Henry Paulson suggested a carbon tax for financing basic income. If you think that that the so-called “free-economy” is a euphemism for crony capitalism, wait till the automation era kicks in! But the deeper collusion of governments and capital can only lead to the further alienation of citizens. We are on the cusp of a citizen rebellion across the developed world. It would be foolhardy to suggest that, somehow, citizens will be quelled by UBI to the extent that they relinquished their rights, privacy, and well-being to decisions made behind closed doors between politicians and high tech, or energy, executives. Also, when we think of UBI we must ask ourselves: do we want to become financially dependent on the State? Especially on a State that is itself financially dependent on the owners of automation technologies?
Finally, there are many ethical problems with UBI. Quality of life is often ignored in the current discussion. There are millions of people currently on benefits whose life is miserable. Extending the idea of welfare to all under the guise of UBI we are in danger of extending misery. There are certainly many who would prefer to live poorly, as long as they do not have to get up in the morning and do any work. To them UBI will be just some extra cash to spend on life’s little luxuries. But most people need to feel valued and productive, to live meaningful lives, to support and nourish loving families, to be creative and develop their full potential. For them a life of idleness on borderline poverty, paid by taxing others who will be enjoying riches beyond imagination, does not seem like a desirable future. Quality of life requires a new way of thinking about work, not government handouts so we can stay home and play videogames all day.
So if not UBI then what? How should we manage the transition to a post-work future? There is too much hype about what AI can really do, and big questions regarding how companies will adopt these new technologies in practice. But if for the sake of simplicity we assume that most jobs will become obsolete by mid 21st century, then we ought to go back to the basics, rather than patching up what has gone wrong with welfare. And the basics include defining the role of citizens in a democratic society as the creators of wealth and prosperity. Democracy is based on the assumption that citizens are the producers of wealth and the owners of property. UBI is undermining the foundations of democracy because it transforms citizen freedom to citizen dependency. We must think beyond dependency, towards innovative systems where machine intelligence leverages our creativity and self-development on a bottom-up, rather than top-down, fashion. In short, we need to reinvent democracy in a post-work future. The alternative would be to enter an era of corporatist totalitarianism dressed up as representative democracy.
A Conservative Case for Universal Basic Income
Christian Bot
It hardly came as a surprise when the
National Review,
a leading American conservative publication, rushed to assail the idea of universal basic income (UBI for short) with its usual vigor, from almost its very first mention. The men and women manning the fort at the
Review—
most of whom are superlative, highly intelligent writers—have remained steadfast in their defense of quasi-libertarian free-market economics against the rising tide of Donald Trump’s economic nationalism. It is of course within their rights to do so, and their principled persistence in an increasingly unpopular doctrine earns my commendation to some extent. But I feel they are mistaken.
But, first of all, what actually is UBI? There have been widely varying proposals, but the essential idea is to provide every citizen of a given jurisdiction with an unconditional sum of money at regular intervals. Its proponents typically insist that, if implemented, it will reduce poverty and income inequality, strengthen the economy by boosting consumer spending, and offer protection from the disruptive effects of workplace automation. The latter will become especially resonant in the coming years, as automation siphons off ever more jobs. But, as the
National Review
shows, it has been an uphill battle to convince many conservatives of the idea’s viability or even its desirability. There is a critical element to this debate, however, that has thus far been almost entirely overlooked. UBI has the power to not only preserve the traditional nuclear family, but to raise its vitality and prestige to levels not seen in many years. As such, it ought to spur conservatives to see beyond their stubborn economic doctrines and acquaint themselves with the conservative case for UBI.
UBI is in essence a radical form of social welfare. But conservatives take a gross misstep when they jump to the conclusion that UBI must therefore be an inherently left-wing idea. It is easy to see why this misconception has been allowed to spread. The very thought of showering individuals with unconditional money, regardless of their work situation, sets off alarm bells for fiscal conservatives, who find any initiative of this sort repellent. But the prime beneficiaries of UBI would be those permanently out of work thanks to automation. Conservatives have long professed sympathy with the “deserving” down-and-outs, and compassion, in any case, is not a monopoly of the left. Conservatives must reject being tethered to a callous and heartless individualism in a perverse race to the bottom to win the posthumous approval of Ayn Rand and her ilk. UBI is no more inherently left wing than salsa dancing is the domain of the right. Conservatives would be wise to step forward and discuss this very important and timely proposal. The image of the cold-hearted conservative need not reflect reality.
Nevertheless, conservative economic thought is stuck in neutral, owing in large part to conservatives’ unqualified support for
laissez-faire
capitalism. Little do they realize that capitalism has played a fundamental role in destabilizing the nuclear family—not only by leaving the poor, the struggling, and the destitute to fend for themselves without social assistance, but also by utterly alienating labor from the moral development of the worker. To better understand this, we must go far back in history and explore the changing nature of labor. I do not idealize the Middle Ages, but the undercurrent of religion that propped up so many areas of medieval life applied to labor too. The typical tradesman of, say, a Belgian town in around 1300 toiled under the understanding that his work was first and foremost a labor of love for God, and only secondarily a means, however necessary, of subsistence. This view was dealt a fatal blow by the Reformation, which shattered the socially cohesive power of the Catholic Church in precisely those areas of Northern Europe that soon began to embark on their mercantile ascendancy. When these regions industrialized in the nineteenth century, the uprooted workers, predictably, found no significant moral or political recourse to mitigate the horror of their plight.
The European nations in which the capitalist alienation of labor proceeded apace remained avowedly Christian. Paradoxically, it was the avowedly atheist Karl Marx who raised his voice more loudly than most against this outgrowth of unrestrained capitalism. Marx was quite explicitly an enemy of the traditional nuclear family. In
The Communist Manifesto,
he trumpeted wife-swapping and the abolition of the family, which he denigrated as a tool for the bourgeois domination of society. But he also observed that the ravages of mid-nineteenth-century capitalism were tearing families apart, through demoralizing overwork and abysmally low wages. In the Soviet Union under Lenin, abortion and divorce were legalized, with the predictable outcome of a declining birthrate. Lenin’s successor Stalin, genocidal thug though he was, saw the writing on the wall and undid much of his forebear’s radical work, notably by prohibiting abortion in most cases. There is more than a hint of the absurd at play when more can be said—at least nominally—for a mass-murdering communist dictator than for twenty-first century conservatives, who evince support for the nuclear family, but steadfastly refuse to take the necessary economic steps to protect it. The overwhelming hypocrisy of it all not only lets down struggling families but erodes their trust in the conservatives who are supposed to be helping them.
The precise channels by which economic strain lends itself to family breakdown are varied and manifold, but the basic principle deserves some elucidation. Most people reading this can relate to the stress produced by the threat of economic hardship, perhaps even of insolvency and poverty. I emphasize
threat,
because the very fear of it often suffices to send whole families into free-fall, as surely as the mere whisper of financial catastrophe can throw Wall Street into an eight-hour terror. The modern mind prizes security above almost all else, but, paradoxically, capitalism in its current incarnation refuses most stubbornly to offer any meaningful measure of it to vast swaths of the population. The
zeitgeist
of the early twenty-first century demands that we ensure a certain level of material security, before we can even begin to discuss preserving the nuclear family. UBI will not, in itself, restore the idealistic medieval conception of labor, but—by alleviating millions of families’ gnawing fears of poverty—it will make that conversation possible.
Conservatives, to their credit, have little problem detecting the deplorable social outcomes of the family breakdown that they abhor. It is almost a truism among conservatives that children who emerge from broken and dysfunctional homes are at considerable risk of future delinquency, drug and alcohol abuse, and low educational achievement. They represent vast sums of sunk costs for the state, which most commonly takes the form of the inevitable welfare, disability, and unemployment payments that proportionately far too many of them will eventually draw upon. This is only one part of the story. The other includes medical costs stemming from substance abuse and its concomitant health problems— above all in countries that have socialized medicine, such as my native Canada—and the cost of law enforcement and detention, should they spend time in juvenile facilities or, later on, in prison. All this money could have obviously been better spent elsewhere were it not so tragically necessary here. What, then, do we have to lose from an ambitious UBI scheme, laser focused on keeping families together and economically secure? We cannot know for sure at this early stage, but it seems likely that the cost of most mainstream UBI proposals will fall well short of the expense of mopping up the mess attributable to broken families.
Some have already hinted at the material basis needed to keep families happy and secure. According to an apocryphal account, St. Thomas Aquinas believed that a pious soul suddenly plunged into the throes of spiritual sorrow ought to seek out a warm bath, a sleep, and a glass of wine. Authentic or otherwise, this attests to the necessity of possessing some degree of material security before you can even begin to think about the moral realm. One may take issue with scholasticism’s habit of compounding virtually everything into a system of hierarchies, but the practice is eminently valid here. There exists a definite hierarchy of needs in asymmetrical relation to one another. At its base are man’s material imperatives, and above these are his moral needs. One may be getting along quite well in the material sense while remaining morally dead, but the inverse is not equally true. This is much like saying that a tower without a foundation is doomed to collapse under its own weight, or that a pizza without toppings is still a pizza, but toppings without dough are not. To continue the culinary metaphor, conservatives never tire of insisting on the centrality of the masculine “breadwinner” figure. They ought to consider whether a family whose breadwinner is out of a job, and staring poverty in the face, can realistically tend to his and his family’s moral growth. UBI, if implemented with commensurately pious intentions, can restore the foundation to the collapsing tower and become a force not only for newfound material abundance, but for moral excellence as well.
In a similar vein, there is more than a germ of truth to the old adage, “a family that prays together stays together.” Try as they might to deny the relevance of the moral realm, hardened atheists and agnostics would do well to take note of the objective benefits attached to personal spirituality, at both the individual and domestic levels. As the Institute for Family Studies observes, “Family prayer time is quality time together, time not spent in front of the television or a smartphone, but rather, time spent communicating on a deeply personal level.” Individual prayer, too, is linked to “reduced stress, increased self-awareness, better communication, and a more empathetic and forgiving attitude towards others.” It does not require a systematic and theological belief in God to appreciate the positive effects of prayer or of cultivating one’s spiritual and moral development more broadly. This is scarcely possible in an atmosphere of squalor and perpetual economic insecurity. If conservatives wish to back up their appeals for more widespread religious commitment, there are few better ways to do so than by providing material peace of mind to those who desperately need it.
UBI is something that we are probably going to hear a lot more about in the near future. The growing impact of automation will ensure that. But, just as economic libertarians are bound to put up a spirited fight against it, conservatives must be ready to vigorously defend it. There is a compelling conservative case to be made in its favor. I sense that a paradigm shift is coming in the age-old spat between liberals and conservatives, one in which conservatives will leave behind the doctrines of economic inaction inherited from a bygone age. The debate surrounding UBI offers an ideal stage on which to prove conservatives’ commitment not only to the humanitarian values of social welfare and compassion, but also to the preservation, strengthening, and promotion of the traditional nuclear family. For far too long, conservatives have tolerated an appalling gap between their words and their deeds. If the conservative movement wishes to prove its enduring fealty to its rhetoric, that gap must now close.

“The flowers exhaled a honeyed aroma.” This sentence demonstrates
Hyperbole
Personification
Simile
“Herb gardeners who work extra get thyme and a half” is an example of
synecdoche
a pun
overstatement

1. (a) Determine a central idea and analyze its development over the course of
a text.
Reread paragraphs 1 and 2. In your own words, state the central idea that Robbins puts
forth about being different in high school. Then scan the rest of the text. How does
Does Robbins develop her central idea? What types of information does she use to support
the idea, and how does that information help the central idea to take shape?
(b) Provide an objective summary of the text.
Write an objective summary of “Revenge of the Geeks.” Remember that a
summary should include main ideas but not specific details. It should not include
personal opinions or judgments.
2. (a) Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text,
including connotative meanings.
Reread paragraph 7. What is the meaning of the word rabidly as it is used in the
paragraph? What connotation does rabidly have?
(b) Analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone.
Why do you think the author chose the word rabidly instead of some other word
with a similar meaning? How does the connotation of rabidly affect the meaning
of the sentence? How does it affect the tone?
3. Identify a specific claim made by Alexandra Robbins in “Revenge of the Geeks.”
Then, evaluate the evidence the author provides for the claim. Is the evidence she
provides relevant? Remember, for evidence to be considered relevant, it should be
current, and it should connect clearly and directly to the author’s ideas. Is the
evidence sufficient? That is, does the author present enough different types of
evidence from a variety of credible sources?
Use these guidelines in your writing or discussion.
• State the specific claim from the selection on which you will be focusing.
• Tell what evidence the author uses to support the claim.
• Give your evaluation of the relevance of that evidence, and support your
judgment.
• Tell whether you think the evidence is sufficient to support the claim, and
explain why or why not.

Beloved Discussion Questions – Chapters 1 & 2
What does Sethe have engraved on the tombstone of her daughter? Why? How does she “pay” for this?
What is 124?
Why are so many men at Sweet Home named Paul? What does this indicate about the slaves/individuals?
Why is there an eerie light, moving furniture, and a dog thrown across the room at Sethe’s house?
What does Paul D tell Sethe she has on her back? Why is this description symbolic?
What happens to the spirit when Paul D comes to the house?
Who is Baby Suggs? What did Halle do for her? What happened to her other children?
How does Denver feel about the spirit? How does she feel about Paul D? How do you know?
What did Schoolteacher’s nephews do to Sethe in the barn? What happened to Sethe after she told Mrs. Garner what the boys did?

Syntax Analysis
i want a parade i want music i want confetti i want a marching band for the ones surviving
in silence i want a standing ovation for every person who wakes up and moves toward the
sun when there is a shadow pulling them back on the inside – rupi kaur
What is your interpretation from this poem? What are the Syntax can be seen and identified from this poem?  (With explanation)
Also refer from here for identifying the Syntax from the poem. I hope for your kind consideration. Thank you!
5.4 Poetic syntax In this seCtion, we’ll consider how sentence structure interacts with poetic form, speci?cally the way in which sentences and phrases are completed (or not) within the boundary of a poetic line. When a sen- tence or phrase is completed at the end of a poetic line or when a poetic line ends at a grammatical boundary (often indicated by punctuation), the line is said to be end—stopped. In contrast, run—on lines continue the syntaCtic struCture from one line onto the next, a feature known as enjambment. In some instances, enjambment can create syntactic ambiguity: when sentences are enjambed, readers may ?nd it dif?cult to construe the syn- tacric use of a word at the line-ending. This is known as double syntax, where a line-ending or line—starting word initially seems to function in one syntacric role as it is read, but its succeeding content suggests that it is being used in an alternate syntacric role. In F urniss and Bath’s (2007 [1996]: 81) words, ‘syntax becomes “double” when the word or phrase at the line ending can be taken as belonging grammatically either with what comes before or with what comes after’. Consequently, both understandings of the double syntax exist in readers’ minds. Matthea
64 LITERATURE AS LANGUAGE Harvey’s (2000: 29) poem ‘In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden’ contains six instances of double Syntax. See if you can spot them as you read the poem: IN DEFENSE OF OUR OVERGROWN GARDEN 1 Last night the apple trees shook and gave each lettuce a heart 2 Six hard red apples broke through the greenhouse glass and 3 Landed in the middle of those ever—so slightly green leaves 4 That seem no mix of seeds and soil but of pastels and light and 5 Chalk x’s mark our oaks that are supposed to be cut down 6 I’ve seen the neighbors frown when they look over the fence 7 And see our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape I did like that 8 They looked like candelabras against the wall but what’s the sense 9 In swooning over pruning I said as much to Mrs.]ones and I swear 10 She threw her cane at me and walked oilL~ down the street without 11 It has puzzled me that people coo over bonsai trees when 12 You can squint your eyes and shrink anything without much of 13 A struggle ensued with some starlings and the strawberry nets 14 So after Untangling the two I took the nets off and watched birds 15 With red beaks ?y by all morning at the Window and reread your letter 16 About how castles you ?ew over made crenellated shadows on 17 The water in the rainbarrel has over?owed and made a small swamp 18 I think the potatoes might turn out slightly damp don’t worry 19 If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bon?re 20 So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them 21 To close I’m sorry there won’t be any salad and I love you None of the lines end with punctuation, so the completeness of each line is dependent on readers’ interpretations of syntactic units. L1 appears to be end—stopped. L2 offers explanation to the previous metaphor — that red apples fell from the tree and thus looked like ‘hearts’ when they landed amongst the lettuces — and is enjambed with the conjunction ‘and’ coordinating verb phrases across lines. Whilst L3 initially appears to be end-stopped, the next line continues the sentence with posr—modi?ca- tion to the noun with a relative clause: ‘leaves / That seem . . .’. The ?rst instance of double syntax doesn’t appear until the transition from L4—5: That seem no mix of seeds and soil but of pastels and light and Chalk x’s mark our oaks that are supposed to be cut down The polysyndetic use of ‘and’ at the end of L4 serves to coordinate nouns, thus ‘Chalk’ at the start of L5 initially appears to function as
PHRASE T0 SENTENCE 65 the ?nal noun in this list. However, as the line continues it becomes apparent that ‘Chalk’ is performing a double Syntactic role. It is also being used by Harvey as pre—rnodifying adjecrive in the subject of a new sentence ‘Chalk X’s mark our oaks . . .’. The second instance of double syntax occurs across L7—8 where the poetic voice states ‘I did like that’. In this clause, ‘1’ is the subject and ‘did like’ is the predicate. ‘Like’ is a transitive verb that requires an object so it initially seems as though ‘that’ is the direct object of the verb, refer- ring anaphorically back to the ‘espalier pear trees’. The continuation of syntax in L8, though, suggests that ‘that’ also signals the start of what is known as a that—clause, a subordinate clause that ?lls a nominal position (of subject or object): I like that / they looked like candelabras . . . Subject Verb Object Tbat—clauses differ from relative clauses (which were introduced in section 5.3): that—clauses take the role of a compulsory element in the sentence as subject or object. Returning to Harvey’s poem, we can see that whilst ‘that’ initially appears to perform the syntactic role of ana— phoric DO, upon further reading it seems that it also performs another syntactic role as the start of a that—clause. It is therefore an instance of double syntax. The pronoun ‘it’ at the start of L11 is the third case of double syntax, functioning both as anaphoric reference to Mrs. Jones’ cane and as subject in the sentence ‘It has puzzled me’. ‘A struggle’ in L13 is a noun phrase, which likewise ends its preceding sentence and acts as opening subject to the next. A similar effect takes place in the ?fth instance of double Syntax ‘The water’ at the start of L1 7 is a noun phrase embedded in the prepositional phrase ‘of / the water’ (L16—17) as well as the head noun of the larger noun phrase ‘The water in the rainbarrel’ which is the subject of the predicate ‘has overflowed’. The imperative ‘don’t worry’ at the end of L18 is the ?nal occurrence of doubIe syntax, originally seeming to refer anaphorically to ‘the potatoes’ before the conditional conjunction ‘if’ launches a subordinate clause at the start of L19 for which ‘don’t worry’ would act as the main clause. We have focused here on grammatical analysis, but it is always important to link linguistic features to their overarching literary signi?— cance. The six cases of double syntax in ‘In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden’ are playful and complex but they work not only to double syn- tactic functions and meanings. They can also be read as a form of ico- nicity in the poem. Like the overgrown garden, the poem itself appears overgrown, with the boundaries between poetic lines and sentences
66 LITERATURE AS LANGUAGE Table 5.2 Sentence types and clause combination No. of lexical verbs No. of clauses Combined through . . . Sentence type 1 1 Simple 2 or more 2 or more Coordination Compound 2 or more 2 or more Subordination Complex growing into each other, so to speak. Keywords and summary Clauses, complement, complementdtzon patterns, coordination (ryndetic, nyndetic, polygndetic), double syntax, enjnmlament, iconic tyntttx, object (direct; indireczj, object complement, phrase: (bend, dependents), predicate, relative clauses, ten— tencet (complex, compound, simple), mono; subject complement subordination, tent-clauses, can type: (complex—nominee copulation ditrnncitive, intransitive, transitive). This chapter has offered an introduction to some key aspects of syn- tactic analysis. Section 5.1 described clause elements (such as subject, verb, and object) and explained that different verb types create different complementation patterns. Moving from simple sentences to the subject of coordination and subordination, it was shown that the number of lexical verbs determines the number of clauses. The number of clauses, the type of clause, and how those clauses are joined together determines the type of sentence. This is summarised in Table 5.2. The analyses in this chapter, particularly of Cormac McCarthy’s Tlae Road and Matthea Harvey’s ‘In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden’, demonstrate the value of syntactic analysis for Stylistics. Syntactic struc- tures can create meaning, emphasis, and stylistic texture.

Choose the more appropriate word to replace the sexist language in this sentence: After the storm, the mayor declared that the local park would require all of its manpower to repair the damage.
personnel
labor pool
Choose the more appropriate word to fill in the blank: The marching band was      to find out that they had been invited to perform in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Choose the revised word or words that effectively avoids the use of a cliché: Donna’s thought process was all over the map, which made it difficult to follow along.
not well organized
like a train off its rails
like an unkempt room
like a ping pong ball
Choose the revised word or words that effectively avoids the use of slang: Thomas was really messed up after the loss of his favorite dog.
bummed out
grieving
having a nightmarish time
down in the dumps

The Grandmother, for example, lives almost entirely in fictions- newspaper clippings, stories for the grandchildren, her belief that The Misfit is a good man. In contrast, The Misfit is more literal than the Grandmother in his perception of reality. He knows, for example, whether the car turned over once or twice. But he too is posing, at first as the tough guy who rejects religious and societal norms by saying, “…it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can- by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness…” (267). Finally, he poses as the pessimist- or, according to O’connor’s reading, the Christian- who claims, “It’s no real pleasure in life.” The contradictions in The Misfit’s language make it impossible to tell which of these facades is “real.” Source: “A Deconstructionist Reading: Flannery O’connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Portable Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, edited by Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell, Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2013, p. 1228. Read the sentence that follows and then identify the reason that it is plagiarized from the first paragraph of the source. The author of “A Deconstructionist Reading: Flannery O’connor’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find” claims that the language in the story is ironic because her narrators and characters often say one thing but mean another (1228). The sentence fails to note the title and page number of the source. The sentence fails to enclose the words of the source within quotation marks. O The sentence misrepresents the idea of the original source. Identify the sentences that follow that plagiarize from the second paragraph of the original source. Check all that apply. O The Misfit speaks literally, but he also poses as a tough guy and as a Christian. In contrast to the Grandmother’s fantasy world, the Misfit sees reality clearly (“A Deconstructionist Reading” 1228). O The Grandmother in the story exists mostly in a fictional world of newspaper clippings and stories, which translates to her belief that The Misfit is inherently good (“A Deconstructionist Reading” 1228). As indicated by “A Deconstructionist Reading,” the Misfit’s conflicting Identities- as a realist, a pessimist, and a rebel – obscure his “real” identity from the reader (1228).

The Clever Young Man and the Monster
https://afriprov.org/afri-story/the-clever-young-man-and-the-monster/
Tanzania
1.    How did the story begin?
2.    What was the first thing the young man brought? The
second? The third? And the fourth? Explain in your own words.
3.    What was the ending of the story?
Rawera (The Comforter) and the Monsters
https://afriprov.org/afri-story/rawera-the-comforter-and-the-monsters/
Nairobi, Kenya
1.    Who are the characters in the story? Describe each.
2.    How did the villagers treat the couple?
3.    Who helped the main character all throughout the
story?
4.    How did the people treat the couple at the end of
the story?

Passage from 4.3.165-79
165      Well, come, my Kate, we will unto your father’s
Even in these honest mean habiliments.
Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor,
For ’tis the mind that makes the body rich.
And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds,
170      So honor ‘peareth in the meanest habit.
What, is the jay more precious than the lark
Because his feathers are more beautiful?
Or is the adder better than the eel,
Because his painted skin contents the eye?
175      Oh, no, good Kate; neither art thou the worse
For this poor furniture and mean array.
If thou account’st it shame, lay it on me,
And therefore frolic: we will hence forthwith
To feast and sport us at thy father’s house.
Questions
1. In general, does this passage feature more end-stopped or enjambed lines?
2. Read aloud line 165.  “Well, come” can be heard (not read) in two different ways. What are they?
3. Read line 167 aloud. Generally speaking, what is this pause called? And what kind of pause is present in this line (review the lecture notes & slides from Day 2)?
4. Scan line 168. What is this meter called?
5. Note the possessives in line 165, and compare them to those in line 167. What changes?
6. Explain briefly the analogy Petruccio makes between the sun & dark clouds as well as honor & habit.
7. Line 175 uses “art” which is an example of what kind of ending? (Hint: think back to Day 2 lecture & notes) How would you translate this word within the context of the line.
8. Look very closely at lines 171-74, which make an argument regarding comparative value. The reliance on “more,” “better,” and “precious” are examples of this. But, despite Petruccio’s argument, a jay is different from a lark and an adder is easily distinguished from an eel. Spend a few sentences writing about their differences and what those differences might mean to an interpretation of the lines.
9. Paraphrase (i.e., put into your own words) line 177.
10. How many times did Petruccio use “mean” or its variants here? How do you interpret this repetition?
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11. We must also remember the scene’s strangeness: Petruccio and Kate are wearing not “mean,” but fabulous clothing! So, he delivers this speech about how the externals don’t matter or aren’t representative of one’s inner quality while wearing sumptuous clothing. Write 2-3 sentences about how you interpret that irony or tension between his words and his costume.