Style unit test

Connotation vs denotation

Diction

Anaphora at scale

Antithesis

Sentence fragments as choices

Periodic vs loose sentence

Understatement and hyperbole

Jargon and its double edge

Punctuation as a rhetorical choice

Personification

Syntax

Analyzing a shift

RHETORICAL ANALYSIS (Question 2, 6 points). Laura Amy Schlitz is a librarian and author who received the 2008 Newbery Medal — awarded annually by the American Library Association for distinguished children's literature — for her book Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village. The passage is an excerpt from her acceptance speech at the ALA Annual Conference. The passage, described (read the released passage at AP Central for the full text): Schlitz opens with a self-deprecating confession — she has never once been able to fly a kite; kites drag behind her "like the broken muffler of a car" while lithe, active people sail them overhead. At fifty she resolved to fly one anyway, bought a purple-and-scarlet parafoil from a clerk who guaranteed that small children could fly it, and — despite his salesman's bravado, which she recounts with relish — failed twice more, with bystanders averting their eyes. Two years later, having won the Newbery, she went to the ocean to write her acceptance speech and, on impulse, packed the kite; her life had changed, and she "was living in a world where anything was possible." On a gray, windy morning the kite finally rose — and in her telling it stops being a kite and becomes a creature, a "nylon falcon, willful and capricious," lashing its tail like a tiger and pirouetting. When her cold hand drops the spool, she makes what she calls an obvious but startling discovery: without the tension of her hand on the string, the kite cannot soar — it falters and plummets. She chases the rolling spool down the beach, recovers it, flies the kite until the string runs out, then lures it back down and catches it in the air like a falconer. She closes the excerpt by turning to her audience: she tells this story "because this story makes sense" — as a figure for what it is to be a writer. Write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices Schlitz makes to achieve her purpose of communicating what it is to be a writer. You should: present a thesis analyzing the writer's rhetorical choices; select and use evidence; explain how the evidence supports your line of reasoning; demonstrate understanding of the rhetorical situation; and use appropriate grammar and punctuation.