Commas and Semicolons

My father had left our house in the midst of a fight, between Lindsey and my mother. My mother was trying to get Lindsey to go with her to the Y to swim. Without thinking, Lindsey had blared, "I'd rather die!" ,at the top of her lungs. My father watched as my mother froze, then burst fleeing to their bedroom to wail behind the door. He quietly tucked his notebook in his jacket pocket, took the car keys off the hook by the back door, and snuck out.

Gossip

1) If I triple-filtered everything, my conversations would probably be a lot different. Everything we mostly hear isn't always true but we still tell it to our friends, who pass it on to theirs. If everything we said was triple-filtered there would be a lot less gossip.

2) People decide to gossip because that's what everyone else does around them. In high school, especially, it has been done a lot since I've been here. Girls are really bad about it! Most girls don't really want to do it but they get in a group of people where everyone around them is talking and they feel they have to say something to. Gossip really does hurt a lot of people emotionally.

Literary Elements: TAKS PT 3

1) Satire: a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn.

2) Irony: a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the others false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning.

3) Analogy: inference that if two or more things agree with one another in some respects they will prob. agree in others.

4) Foreshadowing: to represent, indicate, or typify beforehand.

Figurative Language

1) Figurative- expressing one thing in terms normally denoting another with which it may be regarded as analogous.

2) Figure of Speech- a form of expression used to convey meaning or heighten effect often by comparing or identifying one thing with another that has a meaning or connotation familiar to the reader or listener.
Imagery- making mental images or figurative language.
Trope- the use of a word or expression in a figurative sense.

3) They all talk about figurative language and give an expression or image.

Story Spinners: Option 1

As the old man approached my friends and me we sat quietly with our heads down. My friends and I weren't sure what he wanted, though we had an idea. None of us quite knew how he would've figured out what had happened. We all thought that we had kept our secret pretty well hidden, but obviously we were wrong. Somehow this man found out about the the night and what happened about a week ago.
About a week ago my friends and I were really bored at home and couldn't think of anything to do. Then, Shelby had the idea that maybe we should all go get bicycles and meet back up to ride around town. Before everyone left I shouted out, "Everyone meet back up here in an hour." By the time everyone had returned to the meeting place it was already dark outside so we ran across the street to ask if we could borrow a few flashlights from the neighbors. After we got those, we taped them to the front of our bikes. While we were riding around town that night we noticed something going on in the store across the street, so we decided to go ahead and ride over there. Soon after we arrived we noticed that it was one of our good friends being picked on by the neighborhood bully. Taylor shouted, "Hey, leave our friend alone!" The bully wasn't happy about this and told all of us that if we ever said anything about this to anyone we'd be next. Brennan sprinted down the street barefoot to go home and hide in his room before it happened to him. We all thought that Brennan had a great idea, and since we were only nine we didn't want that to happen to us. I made sure that our friend was okay, then pedaled home on my bike as fast as i could. Shortly after everyone had returned to their homes, I got a call from Shelby. All she did was talk gibberish. At the end of the conversation we decided to tell everyone of our agreement to never to talk about this again.
After thinking over all this as the old man walked toward us. We were still just as scared as we had been the night it happened. The man looked us all in the eyes, one at a time. Then, after he gave us each a terrifying look asked, "Why aren't you kids in school." Everyone then took a deep breath, and then we explained that we didn't have school that day because we were on our break. Finally, the man left and we all were so relieved that we didn't have to tell him what happened. Everyone went home after he had left and once more promised to never talk about what happened again.