Monday, January 23, 2012

Power Hour Quizzes

Compound-complex-sentence quiz results: 9 out of 10
Punctuations Quiz results: 14 out of 16

Thursday, January 12, 2012

The Story of the Bad Boy Who Didn't Come to Grief

                   The Story of the Bad Boy Who Didn't Come to Grief

          This story was about a bad boy named Jim, whose mother wasn’t like the other mothers. For example, she didn’t read him a story before he sleeps or give him a good night kiss. Instead, she would  she always spanked Jim to go to sleep, and she never kissed him goodnight. Every time Jim would do anything bad and get in trouble for it, he would let out his feelings hurting someone. He would steal something, and if he got caught he would blame someone else. He would steal apples from a tree, from a farm and run. Although Jim was naughty, thief, or a liar, he never get caught or never gained him a single whipping.

Mark Twain

                                           Mark Twain

          Mark Twain is on nearly everyone's list of all-time great American authors. Mark Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri and as a young man held a series of jobs which included work as a printer's apprentice, a Mississippi riverboat pilot, and a newspaperman in Nevada and San Francisco. He moved gradually from journalism to travel writing and then to fiction, aided by the success of his 1869 travel memoir The Innocents Abroad. His humorous tales of human nature, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 1876, and Huckleberry Finn 1885, remain standard texts in high school and college literature classes. In his own day Twain was a tremendously popular figure and a celebrated public speaker who toured widely. Other Twain classics include Life on the Mississippi 1883, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court 1889, and the short story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County 1867. Twain courted a young woman from Elmira, New York, named Olivia L. Langdon, whose brother had sailed with him on the Quaker City. By in the begging of 1870 Mark had been married to her and had on child but had died, but they had 3 girls. Mark had many problems; he lost $200,000 in investments in the machine between 1881 and 1894. Also, in January 1895, Twain found himself publicly humiliated by his inability to pay his debts. Although he was recovering from his financial problems by 1898, he faced many tragedies such as Susy, his oldest daughter, died of meningitis in 1896, while her parents and Sister Clara were abroad. In 1903, Twain sold the beloved house in Hartford, which had become too closely associated with Susy's death. His wife, Olivia, who had developed a heart condition, died on June 5, 1904. His youngest daughter, Jean, died on Dec. 24, 1909. As Twain's career progressed, he seemed to become increasingly removed from the humorous, cocky image of his younger days.Until, Mark Twain died of heart disease on April 21, 1910.