English 11 A Unit 1: Early American And Colonial Literature Lesson 8

Audience
Fact
Grievance
Opinion
Purpose

Try being logically eloquent. For everything good you say, have a reason or evidence to back it up. Your writing should impress the person and make you look like a powerful person. Use strong words, exaggerating is fine for some areas, but overdoing it will kill your writing. Lastly, a good vocabulary is great but how you place the words together is also what matters!

The ability to be persuasive, of course! You want to use lots of loaded language that helps to exaggerate your points and make them sound more appealing than others.

Of course, it’s never good to give a one-sided argument. Always refute the opposition. Address their points as valid, and then shoot them down!

he Declaration of Independence can be divided into three parts, the first part of which is a statement on natural rights and where governments derive their power–from the consent of the governed.

It then moves on to give the people a right to revolution–“when a government becomes destructive of these ends…” namely “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.” In the very next paragraph, Jefferson starts off with the word “prudence,” implying that the colonists do not enter into this revolution lightly.

The second part talks about the injustices inflicted on the colonies. Jefferson refers to soldiers being quartered there in peacetime, attacks on American coastal areas, and unfair taxation practices.

By doing this, Jefferson is making the colonists appear as conquered people instead of British transplants in a new land.

The last portion is where Jefferson proclaims the independence of the colonies. He does not give any room for compromise–he says that this is the only recourse left to restore colonial rights.

American literature consists of five literary movements.

The Mayflower Compact.

Doubts you.

Anne Bradstreet was never married.

We the people of the United States.

The writers are in complete agreement.

Anne Bradstreet was a wealthy white woman., the daughter of one governor and the wife of the next governor of Massachusetts. She was pampered in her life and station, and lived to the age of 60, She was the first published poet in America. She had 8 children who lived, a sign of wealth in those days, and many famous descendants, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice David Souter.

Anne Bradstreet was a classic religious poet, and also a very modern poet with astute imagist poetry of her daily life and the activities around her. John Berryman’s “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” is a great testimony to her poetic skills.

Phillis Wheatley was the first published Black Woman Poet in America. She was enslaved at the age of 7, captured in Senegal, and sold in Boston as a slave to Mrs. John Wheatley, her Master. She was allowed her to learn reading and writing, latin and greek, and classical poetry and was not forced to work as her poetry became known. She met George Washington, and read poetry in London. She was sponsored by a group of wealthy white women in Boston.

She was emancipated in 1775 upon the death of her Master, Mrs. Wheatley. The group of women then abandoned her, and she married a black grocer. She had 2 children who died very young, and she herself died at age 31, from a combination of childbirth and starvation. Her last child died 3 hours after she did.

She wrote classical poetry with many christian allusions and Pilgrim Motifs, subjects suitable for the Master and owner class. It is notable that most of her poems were lost, but that she still lives as a literate and wonderful poet of her times.

Both of these women are worth reading and contemplating, and my heart often wonders what greatness we would have gotten had Phillis Wheatley been free.

Connotation refers to the wide array of positive and negative associations that most words naturally carry with them, whereas denotation is the precise, literal definition of a word that might be found in a dictionary.