9/12 Stephanie Chen Period 5

   Today in class, we continued and finished analyzing Katharine Brush’s The Birthday Party through annotating sentence by sentence to practice close reading. The procedure was basically the same as what we did the 9th and 10th.

   We picked up at the presentation of the birthday cake and most of the following sentences were about the husband’s displeasure, which the class figured from prior knowledge about his personality and the “pattering applause” mentioned in the sentence. 

    

  These sentences gave us more insight into the husband’s personality and also referenced the “unmistakably married” comment in the very first sentence of the story. His displeasure showed that the couple do not understand each other well: he didn’t think to appreciate her efforts while she should have known his preferences a bit better as they were a middle aged couple.

  For this sentence, we noted the emphasis on the uncomfortableness of the situation and how he had said “some punishing thing, quick and curt and unkind”. The alliteration in the three words sounded like it cut into the wife. The next sentence, which was also the last, ended things somberly. The wife was crying and hiding under her big hat. We didn’t get to annotate this as a class, but I think it summarizes their relationship well: she had been crying all to herself, hidden under her big hat, showing how the couple isn’t on the same page and it’s all one-sided. 

  The past few days annotating The Birthday Party sentence by sentence and together as a class has helped me see different ways of annotating and its importance in understanding text. Previously, I used to just annotate by highlighting and making a few marks, but now I see just how much information we can gather from just a few sentences if we read closely and how important diction and syntax are.