Read the excerpt from act iv of hamlet. claudius: i ha ’t: when in your motion you are hot and dry,— as make your bouts more violent to that end,— and that he calls for drink, i’ll have prepar’d him a chalice for the nonce, whereon but sipping, if he by chance escape your venom’d stuck, our purpose may hold there. by viewing this excerpt through a historical lens, the reader can conclude that shakespeare uses the promise of violence to keep his audience engaged. comment on the monarchy. remind the audience to value life. show the need for intellectual growth.

Which traits are strongest in your persuasive essay: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, or conventions?

Identify the sentence in which the underlined word or words are punctuated incorrectly. a) pam was (well prepared) for the debate. b) she had (read three quarters) of the material more than once. c) she has always been (self assured). d) the winner needs a (two-thirds) majority of the votes.

[1] nothing that comes from the desert expresses its extremes better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the sierras and coastwise hills. the yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age like an old [5] man's tangled gray beard, tipped with panicles of foul, greenish blooms. after its death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes even the moonlight fearful. but it isn't always this way. before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a luxurious, creamy, cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap. the indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast the prize for their [10] own delectation why does the author use the words "bayonet-pointed" (line 4) and "fence of daggers" (line 9) to describe the leaves of the yucca tree? . to create an image of the sharp edges of the plant to emphasize how beautiful the plant's leaves are to explain when and where the plant grows to show how afraid the author is of the plant