Sentence Limitation
“Have you ever wondered to yourself why it is that all people like me seem to have learned from you is how to imprison and murder each other, how to govern badly, and how to take the wealth of our country and place it in Swiss bank accounts? Have you ever wondered why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants? You will have to accept that this is mostly your fault. Let me just show you how you looked at us. You came. You took things that were not yours, and you did not even, for appearances' sake, ask first. You could have said, "May I have this, please?" and even thought it would have been clear to everybody that a yes or no from us would have been of no consequence you might have looked so much better. Believe me, it would have gone a long way. I would have had to admit that at least you were polite. You murdered people. You imprisoned people. You robbed people. You opened your own banks and you put our money in them. The account were in your name. The banks were in your name. There must have been some good people among you, but they stayed home. And that is the point. That this is why they are good. They stayed home." - (By: Jamaica Kincaid pages 34-25 A Small Place)
~ Have you ever taken a good look around and wondered why people seem to be so scared and annoyed because of someone who is dressed differently than them when we have learned from this country about our freedom and how to be courageous, how to stick up for ourselves, and how to take the good and bad and give it equal importance? Have you ever noticed why it is that people are so scared of a lady with a head scarf or a man with a beard when they too have learned to be courageous from this society? You have to accept the fact that not everyone is going to live up to your standards. Lets just take a moment to look at the way we treat other people. We see them. We take what we see and don't take a further glance to see that there's more, a good personality perhaps, not even for a second look, we never look back. We could have made a difference in today's society and said, "lets be open minded, alright?" and possibly seen that we are all just human beings regardless of who dresses different or who appears to be different. Believe me, it would be much easier to have pushed ourselves away from passing judgment. I would have been able to say we are much bigger than that. We judge people. We hate people. We destroy people. We opened up the land of freedom for people and we should be able to open up our minds too. No human is perfect. Nor are we all the same. There is nothing wrong with being different, yet we judge like we know what's perfection. And we have no limitations. That is the only thing we are best at. Judging each other. - Samiha Julakha
AP LC - Sentence Limitation Exercise.
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some of your sentences in here are extremely profound and have a very kick ass message. "We judge people. We hate people. We destroy people." I personally know a lot of first generation immigrants (who doesn't) who have not seen the 'American Dream' and you can see it in their faces, how emotionally broken they are. This is almost always because of some sort of racial or religious profiling. How can we call ourselves a nation of immigrants and the big melting pot when we constantly shun those who are different than us. This is something that has been bothering me for a while and i feel as though you have hit the nail on the head.
ReplyDeleteThe way you made use of the three word sentences was fantastic. Each one stood out from the rest, making our eyes zero in on them as we glance through. Another thing I really liked was the little bits of alliteration. Near the end you were using the words ‘perfect’ and 'people’ a lot. Because of this, the ‘p’ sound was starting to stand out, causing us to notice the repetition in words. It also causes the reader to group together the words perfect, and people together as they go through. No sooner does this pattern click in peoples minds, you go on to say ‘no human is perfect’. The affect of the alliterated ‘p’s creates almost a voice in the back of the readers head, which represents the ignorant person who thinks that there are those who are perfect and those who are not. Whether or not this effect was intentional, it was very effective.
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