As Olivia's essay on "Their Eyes Were Watching God" was quite impressive, we spent most of today's session highlighting the essay's insightful analysis as well as discussing ways to increase the force of the essay by polishing some sentences and addressing some word usage. We broke one of the longer paragraphs into three separate paragraphs, rewrote sentences where the pronouns did not clearly relate to any antecedent , and addressed spelling errors. As the essay required a comparison between the theme of the novel and the theme of two poems, we discussed ways to rewrite the transition paragraph followed by rewording some of the analysis with more vigorous verbs instead of "is ,were" or other forms of the verb"to be". We further worked a few more lines from the poetry into the essay. Last, we addressed the construction of the last sentences so as to eliminate the word"you" which is not preferred in formal English. Olivia proved to be a good editor of her own words. The essay was excellent . We then reviewed Hemingway's introduction to the novel " A Farewell. to Arms" noting his anti -war rhetoric. With that background , Olivia examined the text to locate the anti-war sentiments and aptly commented on the unemotional style of the the diction when the author describes the death of soldiers. As is often necessary in reading Hemingway, we discussed the absence of narrative and discussed the implied narrative lurking beneath the text. For homework I assigned reading through. ch 18 .