Revision Excercise

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A. Close reading (detailed analysis of an extract) requires four tasks:

B. Quoting and paraphrasing. Below is a piece of text from an essay by a first-year American English composition student, Audrey Peake. (See Students Writing Across the Disciplines, eds Cyndia Susan Clegg & Michael M. Wheeler. Fort Wroth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991, pp. 599-602). It is followed by the related entries in a 'works cited' list. Punctuate it correctly: then check your punctuation against Peake's in the lecture book.

Thus Eliot portrays in the last verse of Part I a civilisation which will be remembered only for hollow men instead of lost Violent souls like Guy Fawkes and Kurtz who at least were failures of success, not of will Schneider 106 It is in this last verse that Eliot also introduces what he considers deaths dream Kingdom Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to deaths other kingdom according to Robert Fleissner represent the dead who unlike Eliots hollow men at least face the reality of death Fleissner 40

Works Cited
Fleissner Robert T S Eliots The Hollow Men The Explicator Summer 1984 42
Schneider Elizabeth T.S. Eliot: The Pattern in the Carpet Los Angeles University of California Press 1956

C. Common errors and things that might be better done... Try to identify how each of these sentences could be improved.

1. Heathcliff had been an orphan himself but that did not make him any kinder to Catherine's orphaned daughter, perhaps because she reminded him too strongly of Catherine.
2. To sum up, William Shakespeare, the greatest of the Elizabethan playwrights, has surpassed himself in King Lear.
3. This image of the state as a human body is seen again when Morton describes the kingdom as 'a bleeding land, Gasping for life under great Bolingbroke' (2 Henry IV Penguin ed. 60)
4. This poem by Robert Frost has always reminded me of a holiday I spent at Lake Wanaka one Easter when I was caught in an unexpected snowfall.