Fill in the blanks in the paragraph below with whatever words seem most appropriate. Then compare your choices with those of two other students. In each case, decide which of the three choices you find most effective. Then compare the group’s results with Munro’s (p. 31). Explain why you do or do not find her choice of words (her diction) more effective than your own.
My father would drink a beer on a hot day, but my mother did not join him, and—whether accidentally or _______________________—this drink was always consumed outside the house. Most of the people we knew were the same way, in the small town where we lived. I ought not to say that it was this which got me into difficulties, because the difficulties I got into were a _______________________ expression of my own _______________________ accomplishment (my departure for my first formal dance, I mean, or my hellbent preparations for a _____________________ on college) with an expression of ___________________ and
_______________________ despair, as if she could not possibly expect, did not ask, that it should go with me as it did with other girls; the dreamed of spoils of daughters—orchids, nice boys, diamond rings—would be borne home in due course by the daughters of her friends, but not by me; all she could do was hope for a lesser rather than a greater ___________________—an elopement, say, with a boy who could never earn his living, rather than an ________________________ into the _____________________ _____________________ trade.