Unit 2 Assignment: Mood, Tone, and Style Synthesis Writing

Read the passages, and complete the 3 tasks listed below.
Passage 1: “The American Embassy” 
A new life. It was Ugonna who had given her a new life, surprised her by how quickly she took to the new identity he gave her, the new person he made her. Im Ugonnas mother, she would say at his nursery school, to teachers, to parents of other children. At his funeral in Umunnachi, because her friends and family had been wearing dresses in the same Ankara print, somebody had asked, Which one is the mother? and she had looked up, alert for a moment, and said, Im Ugonnas mother. She wanted to go back to their ancestral hometown and plant ixora flowers, the kind whose needle-thin stalks she had sucked as a child. One plant would do, his plot was so small. When it bloomed, and the flowers welcomed bees, she wanted to pluck and suck at them while squatting in the dirt. And afterwards, she wanted to arrange the sucked flowers side by side, like Ugonna had done with his LEGO blocks. That, she realized, was the new life she wanted.
Passage 2: “Ishwari’s Children” 
The banks on both sides were splotched here and there with dried kaash and grass, like the fine sun-bleached thinning hair of the very old. The verdant riverbanks of Ishwari in full spate had disappeared. As we walked on, the sparse vegetation dwindled as the recognizable riverbanks melded into white sand. The pale winter sun had found the one place where it could live its former glory and showed no mercy. The sand and the sun dazzled and benumbed my little-boy eyes: the stark whiteness was everywhere, everything around me seemed to glow. It seemed a landscape of an unimagined world, as if I had entered dream-time. Even the sounds of the world appeared to have changed. Gone was the steady thrum of Ishwari; the calm bustle of the household and of the village as they went about their day was a distant dream. Instead, all I could hear was the constant rhythmic swishing as the sand shifted beneath our feet and the discordant cry of a hawk as it circled far above us.
TASK # 1
Chart 1: Mood & Tone Pre-Writing Chart (see for reference)Choose at least one positive and one negative mood word; and one positive and one negative tone word from each passage.  Place an example (quote) next to each mood and tone word. You should have at least 8 words minimum. The table below shows an example entry. 

   Tone/Mood
The American Embassy      
 Ishwari’s Children

Positive Mood Words  
 Optimistic: “A new life.”  
  Word: “quote”  

TASK # 2
Chart 2: Style Pre-Writing Chart: In each column, choose rhetorical choices from each passage.  Provide an example (quote) next to each mood and tone word. See the examples below and then find your own. 

  The American Embassy                        
  Ishwari’s Children                               

 Diction/Word Choice (formal or informal) 

 Sentence Structure (simple, compound, complex) 

 Point of View (1st or 3rd)

1st Person: “ISHWARI WAS THE ONLY RIVER I had ever really seen, and the truest.” 

 Rhetorical Appeal (ethos, logos, pathos)

 Pathos: “flowers” “bloomed” and “welcomed”

 Literary Conventions (irony, metaphor, imagery)

 Metaphors: arrangement of Ixora flowers compared to her son’s LEGOS

TASK # 3
Synthesis Paragraph: Then, in one paragraph, compare and contrast the two passages according to each chart.  Do not merely list similarities and differences. Instead, synthesize your examples into an argument that addresses the reasons for each author’s choices, use of style, and what effects each has on the reader.  You may use short quotes as evidence, but be sure to follow up each with an explanation.