Day 3 ELA Text Set

What makes text complex?

Excerpts from Literature

Text 1

The wheelbarrow picked up speed, so quickly that it sort of kicked up like a whipped horse. I thought the handle was going to rip right out of my fingers.

“Hang on,” I said.

“If I can,” said Soup.

We were running now, full speed, smack down Sutter’s Hill and heading full tilt toward the party. Ahead of us, the giant pumpkin bounced around inside the bin of the barrow. I felt like we’d stolen the moon.

“We’re out of control!” yelled Soup.

“Turn it. Do anything, anything!”

“Can’t.”

The front door of the Baptist Church grew bigger and bigger, rushing toward us like a mad monster. My feet hardly touched the ground. I was too frightened to hang on much longer, yet frightened even more to let loose. Soup was screaming and so was I.

“Stop,” wailed Soup.

From the street, there was one step up to the door of the Baptist Church. The door was closed.

What makes text complex?

Excerpts from Literature

Text 2

All day Buck brooded by the pool or roamed restlessly about the camp. Death, as a cessation of movement, as a passing out and away from the lives of the living, he knew, and he knew John Thornton was dead. It left a great void in him, somewhat akin to hunger, but a void which ached and ached, and which food could not fill. At times when he paused to contemplate the carcasses of the Yeehats, he forgot the pain of it and at such times he was aware of a great pride in himself – a pride greater than any he had yet experienced. He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang. He sniffed the bodies curiously. They had died so easily. It was harder to kill a husky dog than them. They were no match at all, were it not for their arrows and spears and clubs. Thenceforward he would be unafraid of them except when they bore in their hands their arrows, spears and clubs.

What makes text complex?

Excerpts from Literature

Text 3

It would have been in consonance with the spirit of Captain Vere should he on this occasion have concealed nothing from the condemned one; should he indeed have frankly disclosed to him the part he himself had played in bringing about the decision, at the same time revealing his actuated motives. On Billy’s side it is not improbable that such a confession would have been received in much the same spirit that prompted it. Not without a sort of joy indeed he might have appreciated the brave opinion of him implied in his captain making such a confidant of him. Nor as to the sentence itself could he have been insensible that it was imparted to him as to one not afraid to die. Even more may have been. Captain Vere in the end may have developed the passion sometimes latent under an exterior stoical or indifferent. He was old enough to have been Billy’s father. The austere devotee of military duty, letting himself melt back into what remains primeval in our formalized humanity, may in the end have caught Billy to his heart, even as Abraham may have caught young Isaac on the brink of resolutely offering him up in obedience to the exacting behest.

DMU Timestamp: February 21, 2017 15:38

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