Unit 3 Active Reader

Grammar Punctuation Usage Lens

Page 1

The first time I went to Washington, D.C., was on the edge of the summer when I was supposed to stop being a child.

Past, present, and future verb tenses are the way writers help readers understand the sequence of events that occur in a reading.

Being consistent with verb tenses helps place readers on the timeline of the story:

---(past)---------------(present)----------------(future)---

In the first sentence, the reader is placed squarely in the past with all three verbs conjugated in the simple past tense. In fact, almost all the verbs in the first paragraph are in the same past tense, establishing that the primary time frame for this narrative is in the past when the author took a trip to Washington, D.C., with her family.



I don’t know what she was supposed to stop being.

Past, present, and future verb tenses are the way writers help readers understand the sequence of events that occur in a reading.

Every other sentence in the first paragraph is in the past tense except for this one, which uses both the present tense and the past tense. In this instance, the present tense: I don’t know . . . refers to the author at the time she is writing the narrative, and the past tense refers to the time in the past when the author’s sister graduated from high school. This places the writing of the story on our timeline from before:

---(past – trip to D.C.)-----(present – story written)-----(future)--

It is important that once a verb tense is established in a narrative that it remains consistent throughout the rest of the story. Any shift in verb tense, such as here, must be purposeful.



There were little violently yellow iced cakes with scalloped edges called “marigolds,”

Subjects and verbs should always agree.

Subjects almost always come before the verb except in cases like this, when the sentence begins with There. The verb still should agree with the subject even though they can be separated by quite a few words. Here, the subject of the sentence is cakes, which is plural and agrees with the verb were.



Page 2

I wanted to eat in the dining car because I had read all about them,

Past, present, and future verb tenses are the way writers help readers understand the sequence of events that occur in a reading.

This sentence has two types of past tenses that help clarify the timeline of events: I wanted to eat . . . is called the simple past tense and it marks the time when the bulk of the narrative took place. I had read all about them . . . is the past perfect tense and lets the reader know that this event occurred even further in the past. The past perfect is created by using had with the past participle of any verb.

---(past perfect)----(past)-----(present)-----(future)----



all of whom were white

Subjects and verbs should always agree.

Some pronouns, though, can be either singular or plural depending on the noun they refer to. Any, more, most, some, and all are examples of such pronouns.

In this phrase, all refers to the students in her sister’s high school class (plural), so the noun is in the third person.



American racism was a new and crushing reality that my parents had to deal with every day of their lives once they came to this country. They handled it as a private woe. My mother and father believed that they could best protect their children from the realities of race in America and the fact of American racism by never giving them name, much less discussing their nature.

Coherence in writing ensures that all the elements of an essay or paragraph reinforce each other and/or the main idea.

In this paragraph, Lorde describes how her family dealt with racism when she was a child and the power of her message is enhanced by the paragraph’s coherence. Notice how racism is referred to numerous times in the first three sentences, both with the pronoun it in the second sentence and the restatement of the main idea in the third sentence with the realities of race in America and the fact of American racism. Restating the main idea in this way tells the reader that the particular paragraph is key to understanding what the author is trying to say about the topic.


Page 3

I spent the whole next day after Mass squinting up at the Lincoln Memorial where Marian Anderson had sung after the D.A.R. refused to allow her to sing in their auditorium because she was black.

Past, present, and future verb tenses are the way writers help readers understand the sequence of events that occur in a reading.

This sentence has two types of past tenses that help clarify the timeline of events: I spent the whole next day . . . is the simple past tense; Marian Anderson had sung after the D.A.R. . . is the past perfect, letting the reader know that this event occurred even further in the past.

---(M. Anderson sings)---(Lorde squints)---(present)---(future)-



I spent the afternoon squinting up at monuments to freedom and past presidencies and democracy, and wondering why the light and heat were both so much stronger in Washington, D.C., than back home in New York City.

Coherence in writing ensures that all the elements of an essay or paragraph reinforce each other and/or the main idea.

In this passage, coherence for the entire narrative is created by the use of detail to reinforce the idea of what Washington, D.C., means symbolically. There are many things to see in Washington, D.C., yet her choice of pointing out monuments to freedom and past presidencies and democracy all help to define that place as more than just a city or a nation’s capital, but a symbol of America itself.



Page 4

Late that Washington afternoon

Coherence in writing ensures that all the elements of an essay or paragraph reinforce each other and/or the main idea.

Pronouns can be used to help transition from one idea to the next, especially between paragraphs.

In this instance, we see the use of the relative pronoun that to connect the time of day of a new paragraph (an afternoon) to the time of day in the previous paragraph (that afternoon).



my family and I walked back down Pennsylvania Avenue

Subjects and verbs should always agree.

One of the most difficult issues with subject-verb agreement is with compound subjects. These are instances where two or more people or things joined by a conjunction act as the subject of the sentence.

In this example, the subject is my family and I, which is a compound subject. Since the two nouns are joined by and, the subject is treated as plural and the verb matches.



Page 5

one by one, my family and I got down from the counter stools and turned around and marched out of the store, quiet and outraged

Subjects and verbs should always agree.

Sometimes a subject will be used for all the verbs in a sentence, especially when describing a sequence of events. In such a case, it is important that all the verbs in the sequence refer to the same subject.

In this sentence, the subject is my family and I and all the subsequent verbs match:



My parents wouldn’t speak of this injustice, not because they had contributed to it, but because they felt they should have anticipated it and avoided it. This made me even angrier. My fury was not going to be acknowledged by a like fury. Even my two sisters copied my parents’ pretense that nothing unusual and anti-American had occurred. I was left to write my angry letter to the president of the United States all by myself, although my father did promise I could type it out on the office typewriter next week, after I showed it to him in my copybook diary.

Coherence in writing ensures that all the elements of an essay or paragraph reinforce each other and/or the main idea.

This passage not only has coherence within the paragraph—the main idea of injustice is referred to repeatedly with the pronoun it—but connects that idea to the central theme of racism in the United States with the phrase, nothing unusual and anti-American had occurred.