In “Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog”, Florey uses a pensive, adoring, and almost secretive tone in order to tell us of his experiences with diagramming sentences. For example, Florey is adoring and seemingly shares a secret with me when she writes, "On a more trivial level, part of the fun was being summoned to the blackboard to show off. There you stood, chalk in hand, while with a glint in her eye, Sister Bernadette read off an especially tricky sentence". The pensive aspect of the essay is shown through words such as, "I have no illusions that diagramming sentences in my youth did anything for me...But in an occasional fit of nostalgia, I like to bring back those golden afternoons...."
I like Florey's tone in “Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog” because it adds flavor to the essay. The tone does this by taking me back to the author's time and causing me to view the world-past and present-through her eyes.
Although I really like the tone that Florey adopts in “Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog", I don’t think it’ll work for an AP essay because it's too informal. Throughout many parts of the essay, I felt like the author was either telling me a secret, or sharing some intensely private moment with me, and I'm not sure if essays like that are what AP readers want.
Through Florey’s use of rhetorical devices in “Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog”, she not only allows the reader to understand better her essay, but also helps it flow better. For example, Florey uses parallelism and tricolon, such as when she says, “...diagramming sentences...memorizing poems and adding long columns of figures without a calculator" to facilitate the flow of the passage and to add power to his recollection of the educational value behind the activities of his youth.
Florey made a good diction choice with "measles" when she wrote, "it [diagramming sentences] swept through American public schools like the measles". Although the denotation of measles is simply something along the lines of an infectious disease in children, the connotation of measles causes the reader to think about the spread of sentence diagrams as a bad thing, something that may scar childhood innocence like measles does. This clever utilization of a word's connotation adds power to the sentence. Florey's use of diction and alliteration (such as when she says, "saintly script") throughout her essay adds a certain spice, imagery, and flow to her essay that would not have existed otherwise.
All in all, "Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog" is a enchanting essay that is neatly executed. The only weakness that I perceive in the essay is that various sentences in the essay were diagrammed, so that since I am a younger reader, I had to stop and stare at the sentence diagram for a while before I could understand what was going on, disrupting the flow of the essay for me. But I think this is made up for by the creativity that the author has shown in adding sentence diagrams to the essay in the first place.
Source: http://harpers.org/archive/2004/12/0080308
Pass! :)
ReplyDeleteAwesome job addressing every single part of the assignment. I also like your word choice-adoring. I've never thought about an essay in that way before. The only suggestion I have in terms of your writing is that you tend to be a little redundant. For example, in your first few paragraphs you stated your main ideas in a few different ways. This made your organization extremely clear, but it also made your writing a little less concise than it could be. Just something to think about for the future. :)
Pass -
ReplyDeleteAh, Wendy the "younger reader" - the epitome of an age-appropriate academic voice. Great organization in that you hit each requirements pretty much one per paragraph, so that made it really easy to evaluate it as a reader. Though your construction may have been overly formulaic, I thought that it suited your purposes very nicely. I especially liked your analysis of diction - who even remembers connotation and denotation? Clearly you do.
Awesome job,
Aisling
Pass!
ReplyDeleteExcellent job, as usual. I liked the words you chose to describe the tone..."pensive and adoring". Your analysis really made me want to read this piece. =) Your structure was very neat and your analysis was strong. The only recommendation I would make is to keep things a little more concise and then add more textual examples. Besides that though, I don't see anything wrong with your post. Awesome job!