Thinking critically about language variety

THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT LANGUAGE VARIETY

The following description of a meal features English that is characteristic of the Florida backwoods in the 1930s. Using this passage as an example, write a description of a memorable event from your daily life. Try to include some informal dialogue. Then look at the language you used—do you use more than one variety of English? What effect does your use of language have on your description?

Jody heard nothing; saw nothing but his plate. He had never been so hungry in his life, and after a lean winter and a slow spring...his mother had cooked a supper good enough for the preacher. There were poke-greens with bits of white bacon buried in them; sandbuggers made of potato and onion and the cooter he had found crawling yesterday; sour orange biscuits and at his mother’s elbow the sweet potato pone. He was torn between his desire for more biscuits and another sandbugger and the knowledge, born of painful experience, that if he ate them, he would suddenly have no room for pone. The choice was plain.

—MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS, The Yearling

Question

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The following description of a meal features English that is characteristic of the Florida backwoods in the 1930s. Using this passage as an example, write a description of a memorable event from your daily life. Try to include some informal dialogue. Then look at the language you used—do you use more than one variety of English? What effect does your use of language have on your description? Jody heard nothing; saw nothing but his plate. He had never been so hungry in his life, and after a lean winter and a slow spring...his mother had cooked a supper good enough for the preacher. There were poke-greens with bits of white bacon buried in them; sandbuggers made of potato and onion and the cooter he had found crawling yesterday; sour orange biscuits and at his mother’s elbow the sweet potato pone. He was torn between his desire for more biscuits and another sandbugger and the knowledge, born of painful experience, that if he ate them, he would suddenly have no room for pone. The choice was plain. —MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS, The Yearling