Question

"Come out into the yard," I say. Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, so chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground. Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure. She's a woman now, though sometimes I forget. How long ago was it that the other house burned? Ten, twelve years? Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie's arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflected in them. And Dee. I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out of; a look of concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney. Why don't you do a dance around the ashes? I'd wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much. I used to think she hated Maggie, too. But that was before we raised the money, the church and me, to send her to Augusta' to school. She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks' habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn't necessarily need to know. Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away at just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand. Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her graduation zo from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she'd made from an old suit somebody gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker for minutes at a time. Often I fought off the temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was.

COMMON CORE RL4
Language Coach
Informal language
Reread the paragraph that begins with line 52. Walker uses sentence fragments such as "Ten, twelve years?" and "And Dee." to create an informal tone. What other fragments do you see on this page? (Hint: look for sentences that lack either a subject or a verb).

Answer 1

The passage provided contains sentence fragments such as "No, no," and "Hush yo' fuss, Eddy!" which contribute to the informal tone of the narrative.

Step-by-step explanation:

Within the passage provided, looking for additional sentence fragments similar to "Ten, twelve years?" and "And Dee.", we can identify other instances that contribute to creating an informal tone. These fragments include "No, no," and "Hush yo' fuss, Eddy!" These snippets lack the full structure of a complete sentence, often missing a verb or a subject, and this stylistic choice mirrors the way people sometimes talk in real life, thereby adding to the informal tone of the narrative.