From A Game of Polo with a Headless Goat Flashcards
What is the genre of this piece?
Travel writing
‘Wacky Races’
Allusion
Cartoon
‘Lads’
Informal/colloquial
‘For eternity’
metaphor + hyperbole
‘Perched’
Connotations of anticipation and instability
‘Fired up’
Metaphor
‘Rather silly’
Informal/colloquial
‘Only action was a villager on a wobbly bicycle’
Anticlimax
Notes about speech
Unparagraphed
Makes the piece more fast paced
‘Roaring up in their wake’
Metaphor
‘Dwarfed’
Metaphor
‘Achieve speeds of up to 40 kph’
Facts
‘Jockeys perched’
Repeated verb - provides cohesion
‘Energetically, although not cruelly’
Shows caring
‘Tooting’, ‘Rattles’
Onomatopoeia
‘Vehicles jostled’
Personification
‘(Like maracas, a metal container filled with dried beans)
Provides explanation for reader without directly interrupting flow of text
‘Swerve’
Chaotic connotations
‘This was Formula One without rules…’
Analogy, allows reader to understand more easily
‘Survival of the fittest’
Allusion
‘Quick reflexes…; Nerves of steel, and an effective horn’
List of 3, contributes to fast pace of paragraph
‘Growing more colourful’
Euphemism, lightens mood
Notes on sentence structures/variations
Long sentences used to build up to bigger events, short sentences to increase pace
‘The finishing line, the hospital gate’
Ironic + humorous
‘The race was over’
Short sentence, emphasis
‘And then the trouble began.’
Conjunction, short sentence for emphasis
‘I assumed’
Implies that original thought was wrong, engages reading by challenging conventional ideas
‘…Fists were out and tempers rising’
Contrast of a concrete noun followed by an abstract noun, gives a better sense of tension at the time
‘Swallowed up by the crowd’
Personification, implies that the crowd is very large and dangerous
‘…I’m underage!’
Punch line of the paragraph, emphatic, humorous
‘Could have caused problems’
Understatement, deliberately vague to be funnier
