Xin Phong
AP Literature
8th Period


Question 3: pg 175

  Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie's arms sticking to me in an irksome manner, with her hair tangled in clumsiness, and her dirty dress falling off her in dreadful flakes. Frozen, her eyes appeared stretched open, unable to take much action, like an animal with undeveloped insticts. And Dee. I see her preciously standing off under the tree, barely safe from harm. She had an intense look on her face as she watched the last bits of the house disintegrate in the merciless flames. Why don't you get out of here? I wanted to ask her. She must've felt discomfort from the sight of our house, unworthy of her magnitude of excellence.
I used to think she wasn't comfortable with Maggie's uneasy presence too. But that was before we raised money, the church and me, to send her to school in Augusta to fullfill her dreams in the pursuit of education. She used to read to us, with hope; projecting words, truths, and revealing the spectrum of the lives of others upon Maggie and I, sitting confined underneath her potential. She embraced us in an air of reality, blessed us with an abundance of knowledge that was nice to know.



I ommitted some words that were insignificant and neutral in describing Dee in a positive light. I included positive words such as, hope, truths, embraced, etc. to portray Dee in a positive way. As for the mother, I rewrote the passage, but remained in the mother's point of view. Her feelings toward Maggie as annoyed, and a hint of shame makes her a bad mother. When describing Maggie in the scene of the burning house, words such as clumsiness, dirty, irksome, and dreadful are used to give a sense of negativity toward Maggie.