Exercise 2: Cumulative, Periodic, and Inverted Sentences

● Exercise 2 ●

The following paragraph from Who Freed the Slaves? by James M. McPherson consists of five sentences: a simple declarative sentence; then a complex sentence that begins with a conjunction and an adverbial clause; another simple declarative sentence; next a short cumulative sentence; and finally a lengthy periodic sentence. Keep the first and third sentences as they are. Reverse the order of sentence two, beginning with the main clause and ending with the subordinate clause, and then rewrite the cumulative sentence as periodic and the periodic as cumultive. Compare the two paragraphs. Discuss the relationship among the sentences in each paragraph and the rhetorical effect of syntax on each.Regrettably, Lincoln did not live to see the final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. But if he had never lived, it seems safe to say that we would not have had a Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. In that sense, the traditional answer to the question “Who Freed the Slaves?” is the right answer. Lincoln did not accomplish this in the manner sometimes symbolically portrayed, breaking the chains of helpless and passive bondsmen with the stroke of a pen by signing the Emancipation Proclamation. But by pronouncing slavery a moral evil that must come to an end and then winning the presidency in 1860, provoking the South to secede, by refusing to compromise on the issue of slavery’s expansion or on Fort Sumter, by careful leadership and timing that kept a fragile Unionist coalition together in the first year of war and committed it to emancipation in the second, by refusing to compromise this policy once he had adopted it, and by prosecuting the war to unconditional victory as commander in chief of an army of liberation, Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.

Question

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Exercise 2: Cumulative, Periodic, and Inverted Sentences: The following paragraph from Who Freed the Slaves? by James M. McPherson consists of five sentences: a simple declarative sentence; then a complex sentence that begins with a conjunction and an adverbial clause; another simple declarative sentence; next a short cumulative sentence; and finally a lengthy periodic sentence. Keep the first and third sentences as they are. Reverse the order of sentence two, beginning with the main clause and ending with the subordinate clause, and then rewrite the cumulative sentence as periodic and the periodic as cumultive. Compare the two paragraphs. Discuss the relationship among the sentences in each paragraph and the rhetorical effect of syntax on each.Regrettably, Lincoln did not live to see the final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. But if he had never lived, it seems safe to say that we would not have had a Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. In that sense, the traditional answer to the question “Who Freed the Slaves?” is the right answer. Lincoln did not accomplish this in the manner sometimes symbolically portrayed, breaking the chains of helpless and passive bondsmen with the stroke of a pen by signing the Emancipation Proclamation. But by pronouncing slavery a moral evil that must come to an end and then winning the presidency in 1860, provoking the South to secede, by refusing to compromise on the issue of slavery’s expansion or on Fort Sumter, by careful leadership and timing that kept a fragile Unionist coalition together in the first year of war and committed it to emancipation in the second, by refusing to compromise this policy once he had adopted it, and by prosecuting the war to unconditional victory as commander in chief of an army of liberation, Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.