Columnist Assignment

Krista Ramsey discusses the benefits of children playing with Legos that they don’t get from other activities.

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/columnists/krista-ramsey/2014/02/15/krista-locking-into-the-magic-of-legos/5521245/

“Because this is not just the World According to Legos, this is the World According to You.”  This is a quote from Krista Ramsey’s column that is very powerful.  This line shows how kids become very creative by playing with Legos.  Because she makes the World According to You a proper noun, the reader thinks of this as an actual place they can go.  It makes the imagination that comes with Legos seem without end.  This line is very impactful on the reader of the column.

Krista Ramsey uses high diction in all of her columns.  She uses figurative language and sophisticated words to enhance her writing.  She also uses many proper nouns to say where she gets her facts from.  Overall, her writing is very impactful and she makes readers think about things they might not have thought about before.

Questions for Krista Ramsey:

How are you personally impacted by all of the people you interview?

Where did you study to become a columnist?

How do you find ways to incorporate so much figurative language in your writing?

What I like best about A Time to Kill

A Time to Kill by John Grisham is a very exciting and intense book.  It keeps me reading and wanting to turn the page each time.  I would recomend this book to anyone who likes thrillers.  I like the intensity of the book, but another thing  I like is its elevated diction.  Grisham uses many sophistocated words with many syllables. He also uses a lot of figurative language, such as personification.  In one part of the book, Grisham describes a man turning off his alarm clock.  He says, "He found it where he had left it, and killed it with a quick and violent slap."  Grisham uses personification in this passage.  He makes the clock seem alive by saying that the man killed it.  We as readers can understand this personification because the alarm clock is making annoying noises like something that might be alive, and the man silences it.  This is only one of many examples of figurative language in the book that enhances the story.

Characterizing Sheriff Ozzie Walls

Ozzie Walls is the sheriff of Ford County, Mississippi in A Time to Kill by John Grisham.  He is an African-American and he is respected by the citizens of Ford County, who are mostly white.  He played football in college and then went to play professionally for the Rams.  An injury caused him to come back home to Mississippi.  He has authority over others and criminals fear him.  He can relate to Jason Bourne, because he is a good person, but he can be tough when he needs to be.  Like Bourne, he is without fear and he will do whatever is necessary to carry out the law, just like Bourne would do what ever is necessary to protect himself.  Although Boune did not have legal authority over others, he had physical authority over them so Bourne and Ozzie are very similar.  This scene shows how Sheriff Ozzie has authority and he can scare criminals, "Looney handed Ozzie the longest, blackest nightstick ever used in Ford County.  Willard was panic-stricken.  Ozzie cocked it and struck the center of the table, sending beer and cans and foam in all directions."

Why I chose to read A Time to Kill

 

I have just started reading A Time to Kill by John Grisham.  I have only read one chapter so far, but the book is already intense.  It starts with a ten year old girl who has been abducted and is being beaten, but she escapes and is found and returned home at the end of the chapter.  I am very intrigued to continue and find out what will happen to the men who did this.

I chose to read this book because I have read the Theodore Boone series.  This is also by John Grisham, but these books are intended for kids in middle school, and that is when I read these books.  I wanted to read some of his adult books and I was recommended this book.  I am glad I started reading it because it is very good so far and I think I will read more books by John Grisham in the future.

The best thing about The Bourne Identity

I am still reading The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum.  I am enjoying the book very much and I would recommend it to anyone who likes thrillers with a lot of action.  The best thing about my book is the suspense.  Jason Bourne is always in danger.  As soon as you think he is safe from some danger that he was facing, something else comes up.  This example comes from a time in the book when Bourne thinks he has escaped people who were trying to kill him, "His eyes were looking at two thin intersecting lines. Crosshairs!  A scope... an infrared scope of  a rifle."

The Bourne Identity: The most important line from a chapter is...

I have recently started reading The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum.  I decided to read this book because I have seen the movie before and I really liked it.  So far I am really enjoying the book also.  I have wanted to keep reading for a long time without putting it down.

In chapter four, the most important line is,"The clerk continued writing, then lifted up the card, reversing it for the guests signature.  Mr. J. Bourne. New York, N.Y. U.S.A."  This quote is very important because Jason Bourne was working very hard to get some of his memory back for a long time and he finally has some closure on who he is.  This quote from chapter two shows how long he had been working on this: "The weeks passed; the verbal exercises continued as the pages grew and the man's strength returned.  It was mid-morning of the nineteenth week..."

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who likes crime thrillers or any exciting books.

Research about Cormac McCarthy

I have recently started reading No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.  Cormac McCarthy is 80 years old.  He is an author and screenwriter who has won awards for his works.  His novel, The Road,  won a Pulitzer Prize and he has also won a National Book Award.  No Country For Old Men was adopted into a film that won an Oscar for Best Picture.  He writes western novels and post-apocalyptic novels.  He has had 3 wives who have all died while he was married to them.  He has had a son with two of his three wives.

A review and summary of 11/22/63

WARNING: SPOILERS
I have just finished the book 11/22/63 by Stephen King.  I enjoyed the book very much, it kept me intrigued and I wanted to keep reading.  I would only give it 8.5 out 10 because for about the second quarter of the book, I was getting bored.  Nothing happened for that quarter of the book and I did not always want to read it.  The book got better though and I was interested again, so most of the book was good.  This is why I gave the book an 8.5/10.
In the book, Jake Epping is a teacher in Maine in 2011.  His friend Al, who owns a diner calls Jake and tells him to come to the diner one night. When Jake sees Al, Al is dying of cancer, which is strange because a day before, Jake saw Al and he was completely healthy.  Al shows Jake a portal to the past that he found in his diner.  He explains that the portal takes him to 1958, and no matter how long he is gone in the past, when he comes back, it has been two minutes in the present.  Also, every trip to the past resets in 1958.  Al tells Jake that he was in the past for 5 years, trying to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing John F. Kennedy, but his cancer prevented him from finishing the job.  He wants Jake to go back to the past for five years and stop Lee Harvey Oswald.  Because Jake is recently divorced and he doesn't see many good things for himself in the future, he accepts.  There is another thing Jake must do before saving the president.  He taught adult high school lessons over the summer for people who never graduated, and he teaches a man named Harry Dunning.  Harry was beaten with a sledgehammer as a child in 1958 by his father and barely survived while the other members of his family were killed.  Jake needs to know that what he does in the past can have an impact on the future, so he goes to the past to stop Harry's dad from killing his family and damaging Harry's brain.  He goes through a journey to stop Harry's father, and eventually shows up at the house on the night Harry's dad killed his family and saved all but one of the Dunning family besides the father.  Jake comes back to the present and tells Al what happened.  He sees that the picture of himself and Harry is no longer in his house, so he had succeeded in changing the past.  Al only remembers who Harry Dunning his because he was so close to the portal.  Jake says he will get some sleep and talk to Al in the morning before leaving for five years.  Jake goes to Al's house in the morning and finds that Al committed suicide.  Jake goes back to the past, stops Harry's father, this time from killing anyone, and goes to live in Florida.  In 1960, Jake moves to Texas and begins to plan to investigate Lee Harvey Oswald once he moves back to the United States from Russia.  Jake moves into a town south of Dallas called Jodie.  He lives there until the assassination and gets along well with the people who live there.  Jake falls in love with a woman in Jodie named Sadie.  George and Sadie spend a lot of time together and they decide to get married.  Jake even tells Sadie where he is really from and what he intends to do and Sadie believes him.  Jake is badly beaten soon before the assassination and he forgets a lot about what he has to do, but Sadie helps him remember it over time.  He doesn't want to involve Sadie anymore in his plans so that she doesn't get hurt, so he hides from her in Ft. Worth two days before the assassination.  Sadie finds Jake though, and she says he is to weak in his current state to do what he intended to do alone, so she comes with him.  The reach the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository just in time to stop Lee Oswald from killing the president, but Lee shoots and kills Sadie.  Lee is then shot by security from the street who heard a gun go off and saw him in the window with a rifle.  Jake returns to Maine and hears that there was a massive earthquake in Los Angeles that killed 7,000.  This didn't happen in his time.  He returns to the present and discovers the world to be much worse than it was before he saved John F. Kennedy.  This is not because John F. Kennedy turned out to be a bad president, but because the past is not supposed to be changed.  Earthquakes happened all over the world that had plummeted into nuclear war.  Scientists say that the world will be destroyed by the year 2080.  Jake knows what he has to do, so he goes back to 1958 to reset the past and then returns to 2011.  Everything was now just the same as it was before, and Jake continues his life in 2011, five years older than he was 2 minutes before.

The best thing about my book is...

I am currently reading the book 11/22/63 by Stephen King.  The book is about a man who goes back in time to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Jake has to live in the past for a long time because the only time he can travel to is in 1958, so he has to wait 5 years before he can gain all the evidence he needs to stop Lee Harvey Oswald and anyone else who might have been involved in the assassination.  The best thing about this book is it is very suspenseful.  There are so many conflicts that interrupt the main character, Jake, from his main goal of stopping Lee Harvey Oswald.  For example, Jake has a girlfriend in the past and on a day when he was supposed to witness Oswald's attempt to murder General Edwin Walker in order to see if anyone was with him, he got a call from his girlfriends crazy ex-husband who had broken into her house and was threatening to kill her if Jake did not come to her house.  This interrupted Jake in his investigation of Lee Oswald and it made him miss important evidence, drawing nearer to the day Kennedy would be assassinated.  Events like this in the book make me want to keep turning the page to see what happens next.