Activity 12
Reading Strategy: Break Down Long Sentences
When an author writes a long, complicated sentence, you can clarify the meaning by
breaking it down into its logical parts. Look especially for the subject and predicate at its
core.
Poe's sentence: A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous
beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful
curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar
formations; a finely molded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a wants subject
moral energy; hair of a more than weblike softness and tenuity--these features, with an
inordinate expansion above the region of the temple, made up altogether a countenance
not easily to be forgotten.
2 predicate
Core sentence: These features made up a countenance not easily forgotten.
Own words: He had a memorable face.
DIRECTIONS: Underline the core of the following sentences from The Fall of the House
of Usher." Then restate the core in your own words.
1. During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of that year,
when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on
horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as
the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
2. I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled
luster by the dwelling, and gazed down-but with a shudder even more thrilling than
before-upon the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly
tree stems, and the vacant and eyelike windows.
3. He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom
which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable
origin-to the severe and long-continued illness-indeed to the evidently approaching
dissolution of a tenderly beloved sister, his sole companion for long years, his last and
only relative on earth.
Student Activity Workbook-1/31/17
English 11A CP-HS1085 - Unic 2
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