Kayla Edwards 9/23/16

Today in class, we started our first non-introductory unit. For our next unit we will be doing rhetorical analysis. This means we will be breaking down an authors argument and we will be making sense of them. This is similar to how we studied Malcolm Gladwell's argument in the outliers about how opportunity and legacy help become successful and how nobody actually comes from nothing. However, in order to do so we need to know and understand the language to do it. So, we began a class PowerPoint on literary devices, called the literary toolbox. Each group of tables got a list of 5 words to define. Then we had to look up an example and make up and example of our own. However we are not allowed to divide the words up among the table. We have to work on each word together so we all understand them. The words I got are apostrophe, euphony, onomatopoeia, polysyndeton, and Alliteration. This project is good because today I learned that an apostrophe is not only used as the grammar sign ', it is also a word that means when you tell at an inanimate object, like for example if I were to yell at my phone, "damn you phone, you're so slow". I found this interesting  because I do that all the time. However, it made me angry that they would call this an apostrophe when the word apostrophe is already used as the name of the symbol used to show possession. Then this made me think of how that must be confusing for people who's native language is not English. At my table we talked about euphonies and tried to make some. Callie's example was "peanut butter and jelly" however because just because the things are nice and delicious doesn't mean the words are. A good example would be "the humming bird floated in the air"

http://literaryterms.net