1. Read the following passage from a speech by Empress Theodora in the year 532.
My lords, the present occasion is too serious to allow me to follow the convention that a woman should not speak in a man’s council. Those whose interests are threatened by extreme danger should think only of the wisest course of action, not of conventions.
What are the prepositional phrases that appear in this passage?
2. Read the following passage from a speech by Pericles in fifth century B.C. Athens:
In our manner of living we show an elegance tempered with frugality, and we cultivate philosophy without enervating the mind. We display our wealth in the season of beneficence and not in the vanity of discourse. A confession of poverty is disgrace to no man; no effort to avoid it is disgrace indeed…yet we pass the soundest judgments and are quick at catching the right apprehensions of things.
What kinds of phrases are the underlined phrases?
3. Read the following passage from Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”:
It had taken a strange chance of hunting, a sudden precipitation into action without opportunity for worrying beforehand, to bring this about with Macomber, but regardless of how it had happened it had most certainly happened. Look at the beggar now, Wilson thought. It’s that some of them stay little boys so long, Wilson thought. Sometimes all their lives. Their figures stay boyish when they’re fifty. The great American boy-men. Damned strange people. But he liked this Macomber now.
Identify the three phrases that are sentence fragments. Rewrite them so that they are independent clauses.