| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain: his mind and grabbed up a stick and hit him over the head
with all his might, and Jubiter dropped in his tracks.
Then he was scared and sorry, and got down on his knees
and lifted his head up, and begged him to speak and say
he wasn't dead; and before long he come to, and when he
see who it was holding his head, he jumped like he was
'most scared to death, and cleared the fence and tore
into the woods, and was gone. So he hoped he wasn't
hurt bad.
"But laws," he says, "it was only just fear that gave
him that last little spurt of strength, and of course it
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: was naturally assigned to similar objects, or to words of similar
formation. This use of genders in the denotation of objects or ideas not
only affects the words to which genders are attributed, but the words with
which they are construed or connected, and passes into the general
character of the style. Hence arises a difficulty in translating Greek
into English which cannot altogether be overcome. Shall we speak of the
soul and its qualities, of virtue, power, wisdom, and the like, as feminine
or neuter? The usage of the English language does not admit of the former,
and yet the life and beauty of the style are impaired by the latter. Often
the translator will have recourse to the repetition of the word, or to the
ambiguous 'they,' 'their,' etc.; for fear of spoiling the effect of the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: she said. "A sister-in-law, who lives at Norwich, tells me it
has been quite unsafe to order poultry. The plague--you see.
It attacks the rats, and through them other creatures."
"And the local authorities are not taking proper steps?"
asked Mrs. Thornbury.
"That she does not say. But she describes the attitude of the
educated people--who should know better--as callous in the extreme.
Of course, my sister-in-law is one of those active modern women,
who always takes things up, you know--the kind of woman one admires,
though one does not feel, at least I do not feel--but then she has
a constitution of iron."
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