ABSTRACT
The original sentence remains a simple sentence, because phrases have either a noun or a verb–not both. Octopuses have turned up inside conch shells and in scientists’ tiny oceanic measuring instruments. Red octopuses particularly like to den in stubby brown beer bottles. Students apply their understanding of prepositional phrases to the analysis of character changes. Students examine the prepositional phrases in the following excerpt from “The Flowers,” a short story in Alice Walker’s In Love & Trouble. The appositive phrases in our models give us more information about the subject, allowing the reader to quickly learn a key element of the character. Students brainstorm attributes they have and then their partner creates a sentence or two with appositive phrases, using their descriptions to rename them. Students find a piece of writing that has a description of a person they know or a fictional character.
