Exercises in Style Study Questions & Topics for Discussion

Exercises in Style Topics for Discussion

Go through the various exercises. Determine which ones are written from the perspective of an implied character (see "Characters—Narrators" for a definition of "implied" in this context). Discuss what sort of person the narrators of those exercises might be.

Recall a randomly experienced, but memorable, occurrence in your life—perhaps an encounter you witnessed on a bus, like the encounter witnessed by the author. Write down that story from different points of view, using different grammatical and/or structural techniques, categories of images, etc.

Do you think the events of the story would be understandable if the reader did not know the events of the story in the first place? As an example, consider the quote from "Mathematical", p. 189. If the reader did not know the story beforehand, would he know that the language here refers to the conversation between the young man and his friend...
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