Victory and Despair:The Roaring Twenties.

Which strategy is the best way to improve the written expression in a redundant sentence?

Remove unnecessary repetition.

Read the excerpt from the interview with E.Y. (Yip) Harburg. I was relieved when the Crash came. I was released. Being in business was something I detested. When I found that I could sell a song or a poem, I became me, I became alive. Other people didn't see it that way. They were throwing themselves out of windows. Harburg was relieved when the crash occurred because

it gave him the opportunity to develop and profit from his creativity.

Read the excerpt from Flannery O'Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." He held the pose for almost fifty seconds and then he picked up his box and came on to the porch and dropped down on the bottom step. "Lady," he said in a firm nasal voice, "I'd give a fortune to live where I could see me a sun do that every evening." Keeping in mind the ending of the story, which best describes the irony of Mr. Shiftlet's statement?

Instead of staying at the plantation, where he can see sunsets like these for the rest of his life, he runs away with Mrs. Crater's car and money.

Which sentence best uses academic vocabulary?

In the last stanza of the poem, the elderly woman expresses anxiety about her family members who live far away.

Which excerpt from The Great Gatsby best indicates that Nick is not fully content with his life?

Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business.

Which incident taken from O'Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" is the best example of irony?

Mrs. Crater thinks she is gaining a son-in-law, when in fact Mr. Shiftlet takes her car, her money, and abandons her daughter at a diner.

Read the sentence. The fake, counterfeit money, which isn't valid, was discovered in the crime investigation. What is the best way to revise this sentence to eliminate wordiness?

The counterfeit money was discovered in the crime investigation.

Which of the following sentences is written correctly?

The drum major performed badly because she forgot the routine.

Read the excerpt from Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. "Tenente," Passini said. "We understand you let us talk. Listen. There is nothing as bad as war. We in the auto-ambulance cannot even realize at all how bad it is. When people realize how bad it is they cannot do anything to stop it because they go crazy. There are some people who never realize. There are people who are afraid of their officers. It is with them the war is made." "I know it is bad but we must finish it." "It doesn't finish. There is no finish to a war." "Yes there is." Passini shook his head. "War is not won by victory. What if we take San Gabriele? What if we take the Carso and Monfalcome and Trieste? Where are we then? Did you see all the far mountains to-day? Do you think we could take all them too? Only if the Austrians stop fighting. One side must stop fighting. Why don't we stop fighting? If they come down into Italy they will get tired and go away. They have their own country. But no, instead there is a war." Which best describes the effect of Passini's long pieces of dialogue?

They indicate that Passini feels passionately about his beliefs.

Read the excerpt from Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. The road was crowded and there were screens of corn-stalk and straw matting on both sides and matting over the top so that it was like the entrance at a circus or a native village. Keeping in mind Hemingway's iceberg principle, what feeling is he trying to convey by describing the scene as an "entrance to a circus or a native village"?

a feeling of unease as the narrator is driving into a peculiar and alien location

Because of his journalistic background, Ernest Hemingway's diction tends to be

a combination of formal and informal.

Read the excerpt from The Great Gatsby. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They were not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size. I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them.

a sense of artificiality in the world the narrator finds himself in.

When you write a compare-and-contrast essay about a common theme, you must

compare and contrast how the themes are developed.

Read the excerpt from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens. The appearance of Gatsby from the shadows suggests that

he is a man of mystery and secrets.

Read the excerpt from Flannery O'Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." "A body and a spirit," he repeated. "The body, lady, is like a house: it don't go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like a automobile: always on the move, always . . ."

two similes.