Musings and Serendipities

Prompt:          The following poem is by the sixteenth English poet George Gascoigne. Read the poem carefully. Then write an essay in which you analyze how the complex attitude of the speaker is developed through such devices as form, diction, and imagery.  Essay:          In the poem "For That He Looked Not Upon Her", George Gascoigne, the author, introduces an internal conflict that is brewing within the narrator. In order to reflect the narrator's attitude of simultaneous contempt and allure for the mysterious woman, the subject of this poem, he carefully utilized diction, form, and juxtaposition to construct a conflicted tone.          The poem begins the speaker's internal monologue by introducing the central conflict: the speaker is described as holding his "louring head so low" to avoid the gaze of a woman. He references this action of a bowed head again, in the last couplet, stating that ...

My task for the first multiple choice practice was to complete a section of 10 prose questions within a given time limit. After I took this assessment, I was given another 10 prose questions to gauge my current skills and shortcomings. My initial goal was to simply answer each factual question correctly (and keep the hyperventilation to a minimum). When I got my scores back, however, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had gotten a 10/10 on both the pre and post assessments.  For me, the most difficult questions were either analytical or inferential. In particular, I initially struggled to comprehend the characterization in the first prose passage, and I had to read it around three times before I could understand how to approach the questions. While this strategy did save me from making mistakes on the more difficult questions, I wasted a lot of time that could have been used other sections. In addition, I had difficulty with analytical questions regarding character por...

PROMPT:         The following passage is from the novel The Known World by Edward P Jones. Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well organized essay, analyze how the author reveals character of Moses. Then, in your analysis, you may wish to consider such a literary elements as point of you, selection of detail, and imagery. TYPED ESSAY: In The Known World by Edward P. Jones, the protagonist, Moses, is characterized as a hardworking but ultimately exhausted slave. Through the intricate setting and imagery details and the third person point of view, readers are able to get an intimate observation of Moses and his life as a slave. Imagery and description predominated most of the passage as a whole. While seemingly superficial, this intense depiction of setting works to shape Moses’s complex characteristics. From the beginning, its bluntly states that Moses is a slave. Although it’s implied that as a stereotypical slave of this time pe...

Prompt: Select a novel, play, or epic poem that features a character whose origins are unusual or mysterious. Then write an essay in which you analyze how these origins shape the character and that character’s relationships, and how the origins contribute to the meaning of the work as a whole. Essay: Oedipus, from Sophocle’s Odeipus Rex , exemplifies a character of unusual and mysterious origins. The unknown prophecy surrounding the setting of Thebes continues to haunt and plague Oedipus throughout the play , and it plays a major role in shaping the plot and the characters. In the beginning of the play, a plague is destroying Thebes, and Oedipus, the King, hears an oracle from Creon and Teiresias in an attempt to cure his townspeople. Creon declares that the murderer of the previous King, Laius, must be killed. Oedipus, who is actually the murderer, does not know of his own unfortunate circumstance and thus is confident that he did not commit any such a...