For those of you who tried your hand at reorganizing the sentences of a paragraph given with its sentence order in confusion, here is that paragraph with the sentences set in order as the authors arranged them. Leave a comment, and let me know how you did!
paragraph corrected to order as published:
In an article describing the preparation of a dictionary for schoolchildren, Alma Graham recounts the imbalance discovered in schoolbooks in all subjects in use in the early 1970’s. In general, the pronouns he, him, and his outnumber she, her, and hers by a ratio of four to one. Not only are women put off, they are also put down, numerically and otherwise. In the real world, women slightly outnumber men. The numbers alone tell us a lot: men outnumber women seven to one, boys outnumber girls two to one; girls are even in the minority in home economics books, where masculine pronouns outnumber feminine ones two to one. But the world created for American schoolchildren presents a different picture. A computer analysis of five million words in context revealed many subtle and not-so-subtle clues to the status of women in American society.
Frank, Francine, and Frank Ashen. “Of Girls and Chicks.” Argument. Ed. Christy Desmet, Kathy Houff Speak, and Deborah Church Miller. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2005. 27,28.
1 response so far ↓
1
Rita Rudd
// Nov 7, 2005 at 1:56 am
Mary, I had one sentence fall into the right position. I can’t wait to see how the rest of the class did in comparison. ~Rita
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