Is Style Meaning?

Prose Analysis of Excerpts from Douglass, Churchill, and Ephron

Directions: Read the following passages and answer the questions below.

PASSAGE 1: There were no beds given the slaves, unless one coarse blanket be considered such, and none but the men
and women had these. This, however, is not considered a very great privation. They find less difficulty from the want of
beds, than from the want of time to sleep: for when their day's work in the field is done, the most of them having their
washing, mending, and cooking to do, and having few or none of the ordinary facilities for doing either of these, very many
of their sleeping hours are consumed in preparing for the field the coming day; and when this is done, old and young, male
and female, married and single, drop down side by side, on one common bed, --the cold, damp floor--each covering
himself or herself with their miserable blankets; and here they sleep till they are summoned to the field by the driver's ]. At
the sound of this, all must rise, and be off to the field. There must be no halting: everyone must be at his or her post; and
woe betides them who hear not this morning summons to the field; for if they are not awakened by the sense of hearing,
they are by the sense of feeling: no age nor sex finds any favor. Mr. Severe, the overseer, used to stand by the door of the
quarter, armed with a large hickory stick and heavy cowskin, ready to whip anyone who was so unfortunate as not to hear,
or, from any other cause, was prevented from being ready to start for the field at the sound of the horn.--Frederick
Douglass
1. Douglass carefully selects details to include in this passage. Four nouns ore repeated at least once. What are
they? Why these? What other noun-objects are especially vivid?

2. Look carefully at the verbs Douglass uses in his passage. What single verb seems most active and vivid to
you? Notice also that several times Douglass uses passive, rather than active, voice. Why normally do we
not recommend the use of passive voice, and yet why is it so appropriate here?

3. The second sentence is the shortest of all in this passage. Why does it have this distinction? What is so
important about the meaning and tone of this sentence?

4. Why is the overseer the only person in the passage given a name?

5. List the "-ing" verbs in the passage. Why are there so many? What do they convey about daily life?

PASSAGE 2: By being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on
to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we
could learn only English. Mr. Somervell--a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great--was charged with the duty of
teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing--namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it
as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually
English analysis. Mr. Somervell had a system of his own. He took a fairly long sentence and broke it up into its components
by means of black, red, and blue, and green inks. Subject, verb, object: Relative Clauses, Conditional Clauses,
Conjunctive and Disjunctive Clauses! Each had its colour and its bracket. It was a kind of drill. We did it almost daily. As I
remained in the Third Form three times as long as anyone else, I had three times as much of it. I learned it thoroughly.
Thus I get into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence--which is a noble thing. And when in after

Used by permission of Idris Anderson

Crystal Springs Upland School, 400 Uplands Drive
Hil!sborough. CA 94010 [email protected]
 years my schoolfellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek
epigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any
disadvantage. Naturally I am biased in favour of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then 1
would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for is not
knowing English, I would whip them hard for that. -Winston Churchill

6. What are the distinctive features of Churchill's style?

a. How does he use sentence lengths for emphasis?
b. How does his typical sentence begin?
c. Cite three sentences that end very effectively and emphatically.
d. Cite five distinctive uses of diction (word choice).
7. Define the tone of Churchill's voice in this passage. Is humor or seriousness his chief point?

PASSAGE 3: I have to begin with a few words about androgyny. In grammar school, in the fifth and sixth grades, we were
all tyrannized by a rigid set of rules that supposedly determined whether we were boys or girls. The episode in Huckleberry
Finn where Huck is disguised as a girl and gives himself away by the way he threads a needle and catches a ball--that
kind of thing. We learned that the way you sat, crossed your legs, held a cigarette and looked at your nails, your
wristwatch, the way you did these things instinctively was absolute proof of your sex. Now obviously most children did not
take this literally, but I did. I thought that just one slip, just one incorrect cross of my legs or flick of an imaginary cigarette
ash would turn me from whatever I was into the other thing; that would be all it took, really. Even though I was outwardly a
girl and had many of the trappings generally associated with the field of girldom--a girl's name, for example, and dresses,
my own telephone, an autograph book--I spent the early years of my adolescence absolutely certain that I might at any
point gum it up. I did not feel at all like a girl. I was boyish. I was athletic, ambitious; outspoken, competitive, noisy,
rambunctious. I had scabs on my knees and my socks slid into my loafers and I could throw a football. I wanted
desperately not to be that way, not to be a mixture of both things but instead just one, a girl, a definite indisputable girl. As
soft and as pink as a nursery. And nothing would do that for me, I felt, but breasts. I was six months younger than everyone
in my class, and so for about six months after it began, for six months after my friends had begun to develop--that was the
word we used, develop--I was not particularly worried. I would sit in the bathtub and look down at my breasts and know
that any day now, any second now, they would start growing like everyone else's. They didn't.--Nora . Ephron

8. Ephron's diction is much more informal than the diction of Douglass and Churchill. Cite four of these
informalities.

9. How would you describe Ephron's use of sentence length? What does she gain by such variety?

10. All three authors use lists at least once to develop their passages. Which author uses lists most often and
why that one more than the other two?

11. All three of these excerpts are autobiographical, but Douglass' excerpt here is conspicuously lacking
the first person pronoun. Why?

12. Who are the possible audiences for each of these writers? What effect do you think these authors would
hope they might have on these audiences? Do these authors have clear or hidden agendas?

Used by permission of Idris Anderson

Crystal Springs Upland School, 400 Uplands Drive
Hil!sborough. CA 94010 [email protected]