Choices, Grammar, Vocabulary
A Christmas Memory
Choices
Writer’s Notebook
1. Collecting Ideas for an Essay Analyzing a Character
Are they credible?
When you write an analysis of a character, you might want to include your assessment of the character’s believability. That is, does the character behave and talk the way a person in real life would behave and talk? Does the character seem like an individual, or is he or she a
stereotype—a stock character you find in many other stories? (Another word for believability is
credibility. You will often hear book and movie critics say, “The characters were not credible.”) Take notes now on a character in Capote’s story, and evaluate his or her credibility. Note specific details that support your evaluation. Save your own notes for possible use in the Writer’s Workshop in this collection.
Creative Writing
2. A Photo of a Friend
Write a poem about a photo of a friend of yours. Tell what you see in the photo and what you wonder about. You might want to review your Quickwrite notes.
Art/Oral Presentation
3. A Collage of the Cousin
A collage is a collection of images, words, or even objects pasted onto a flat surface. The aim is to create an impression—of a place or a person. The words in a collage can come from stories, poems, newspapers, or just your own head. Create a collage of Buddy’s cousin, showing her in one of the settings described in the story: the kitchen, the field, Mr. Haha Jones’s cafe, the house on Christmas morning, her bedroom.
Language Link
Figures of Speech
Capote’s descriptive details help us put our imaginations to work to bring his setting and characters to life. Some of these descriptive details are
figures of speech—that is, they compare one thing to something else, something very different from it.
In the second paragraph, for example, the narrator compares his friend to a bantam hen. A bantam hen is very different from a human being, but if we use our imaginations, we can picture a person who is small, vigorous, and jumpy, the way a bantam hen is.
As you write your analysis of a character, try to use a few carefully chosen figures of speech to tell your readers what your character reminds you of. You might think of an animal, a plant, even a machine. Test your figures of speech to be sure they “work”—how are these two unlike things alike?
Try It Out
For each figure of speech, tell what is compared to what. Does each figure “work”—that is, how are the two different things alike?
1. “. . . the Christmas time of year . . . fuels the blaze of her heart.”
2. “Enter: two relatives. Very angry. Potent with eyes that scold, tongues that scald.”
3. “. . . the stars spinning at the window like a visible caroling that slowly, slowly daybreak silences.”
4. “. . . the beginnings of dawn splash us like cold water.”
5. “. . . we unreel our kites, feel them twitching at the string like sky fish as they swim into the wind.”
Vocabulary
| Word Bank | Analogies
An analogy is a comparison between two pairs of words. The words in each pair have the same relationship to each other--for example: "Toe is to foot as finger is to hand." Fill in each blank with a word from the Word Bank. |
| inaugurating | 1. Amusing is to funny as _________ is to everyday. |
| exhilarates | 2. Biased is to neutral as _________ is to dedicated. |
| dilapidated | 3. Emotion is to feeling as _______ is to temperament. |
| paraphernalia | 4. Opening is to closing as _______ is to ending. |
| sacrilegious | 5. Inundate is to swamp as _______ is to soak. |
| carnage | 6. Soothes is to irritates as _______ is to disheartens. |
| prosaic | 7. Pollution is to contamination as _______ is to slaughter. |
| disposition | 8. Clothing is to outfit as _______ is to gear. |
| suffuse | 9. Vain is to humble as _______ is to reverent. |
| noncommittal | 10. Disorganized is to orderly as _______ is to renovated. |
Click here to navigate through the story: page 1, page 2, page 3, and Homework.
----