This is an essay with only three paragraphs.The first two paragraphs should be the same construction. They will discuss two branches of a large topic (keyword), respectively. Such as: love (Dedication and selfishness）Their structure should be: 1. Topic sentence. 2. Introduce evidence + contextualize. 3. Evidence (Excerpts from the article.）4. Analysis. 5. Conclusion.In the third paragraph, the two branches are compared or analyzed.The first file is the requirements. The second file is my article. The third and fourth files are the articles I used. The fifth is example.The following are the requirements that the professor requires me to modify.“The key to this assignment is the central idea. If you don’t use a central idea you are just repeating what other people have already pointed out. The goal is to learn how to come up with a NEW insight.You are saying Mr. Sweet is a failure, and Alice Walker is a success. This is true, but it is the obvious reading. Everyone will agree with it. In this story, Walker is trying to challenge people’s understanding of success. Something that may be a failure to you, may be a success to me. If you pay close attention, very little is straight-forward. If you polish the English in the draft that you have and create solid body paragraphs, you can get a B. But to get an A, you need to show how a particular concept is more complicated than it seems.”
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To Hell with Dying
by Alice Walker
“To hell with dying,” my father would say. “These children want Mr. Sweet!”
Mr. Sweet was a diabetic and an alcoholic and a guitar player and lived down
the road from us on a neglected cotton farm. My older brothers and sisters got the
most benefit from Mr. Sweet, for when they were growing up he had quite a few
years ahead of him and so was capable of being called back from the brink of death
any number of times – whenever the voice of my father reached him as he lay
expiring. “To hell with dying, man,” my father would say, pushing the wife away
from the bedside (in tears although she knew the death was not necessarily the last
one unless Mr. Sweet really wanted it to be). “These children want Mr. Sweet!” And
they did want him, for at a signal from Father they would come crowding around the
bed and throw themselves on the covers, and whoever was the smallest at the time
would kiss him all over his wrinkled brown face and tickle him so that he would
laugh all down in his stomach, and his mustache, which was long and sort of
straggly, would shake like Spanish moss and was also that color.
Mr. Sweet had been ambitious as a boy, wanted to be a doctor or lawyer or
sailor, only to find that black men fare better if they are not. Since he could become
none of these things he turned to fishing as his only earnest career and playing the
guitar as his only claim to doing anything extraordinarily well. His son, the only one
that he and his wife, Miss Mary, had, was shiftless as the day is long and spent
money as if he were trying to see the bottom of the mint, which Mr. Sweet would tell
him was the clean brown palm of his hand. Miss Mary loved her “baby,” however,
and worked hard to get im the “li’l necessaries” of life, which turned out mostly to be
women.
Mr. Sweet was a tall, thinnish man with thick kinky hair going dead white. He
was dark brown, his eyes were squinty and sort of bluish, and he chewed Brown
Mule tobacco. He was constantly on the verge of being blind drunk, for he brewed
his own liquor and was not in the least a stingy sort of man, and was always very
melancholy and sad, though frequently when he was “feelin’ good” he’d dance
around the yard with us, usually keeling over just as my mother came to see what
the commotion was.
Toward all of us children he was very kind, and had the grace to be shy with
us, which is unusual in grown-‐ups. He had great respect for my mother for she never
held his drunkenness against him and would let us play with him even when he was
about to fall in the fireplace from drink. Although Mr. Sweet would sometimes lose
complete or nearly complete control of his head and neck so that he would loll in his
chair, his mind remained strangely acute and his speech not too affected. His ability
to be drunk and sober at the same time made his an ideal playmate, for he was as
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weak as we were and we could usually best him in wrestling, all the while keeping a
fairly coherent conversation going.
We never felt anything of Mr. Sweet’s age when we played with him. We
loved his wrinkles and would draw some on our brows to be like him, and his white
hair was my special treasure and he knew it and would never come to visit us just
after he had had his hair cut off at the barbershop. Once he came to our house for
something, probably to see my father about fertilizer for his crops because, although
he never paid the slightest attention to his crops, he liked to know what things
would be best to use on them if he ever did. Anyhow, he had not come with his hair
since he had just had it shaved off at the barbershop. He wore a huge straw hat to
keep off the sun and also to keep his head away from me. But as soon as I saw him I
ran up and demanded that he take me up and kiss me with his funny beard which
smelled so strongly of tobacco. Looking forward to burying my small fingers into
woolly hair I threw away his hat only to find he had done something to his hair, that
it was no longer there! I let out a squall which made my mother think that Mr. Sweet
had finally dropped me in the well or something and from that day on I’ve been
wary of men in hats. However, not long after, Mr. Sweet showed up with his hair
grown out and just as white an kinky and impenetrable as it ever was.
Mr. Sweet used to call me his princess, and I believed it. He made me feel
pretty at five and six, and simply outrageously devastating at the blazing age of eight
and a half. When he came to our house with his guitar the whole family would stop
whatever they were doing to sit around him and listen to him play. He liked to play
“Sweet Georgia Brown,” and all sorts of sweet, sad, wonderful songs, which he
sometimes made up. It was from one of these songs that I heard that he had had to
marry Miss Mary when he had in fact loved somebody else (now living in Chi-‐ca-‐go,
or De-‐story, Michigan). He was not sure that Joe Lee, her “baby,” was also his baby.
Sometimes he would cry and that was an indication that he was about to die again.
And so we would all get prepared, for we were sure to be called upon.
I was seven the first time I remember actually participating in one of Mr. Sweet’s
“revivals” – my parents told me I had participated before, I had been the one chosen
to kiss him and tickle him long before I knew the rite of Mr. Sweet’s rehabilitation.
He had come to our house, it was a few years after his wife’s death and he was very
sad, and also, typically, very drunk. He sat on the floor next to me and my older
brother, the rest of the children were grown up and lived elsewhere, and he began
to play his guitar and cry. I held his woolly head in my arms and wished I could have
been old enough to have been the woman he loved so much and that I had not been
lost years and years ago.
When he was leaving, my mother said to us that we’d better sleep light that night
for we’d probably have to go over to Mr. Sweet’s before daylight. And we did. For
soon after we had gone to bed one of the neighbors knocked on our door and called
my father and said that Mr. Sweet was sinking fast and if he wanted to get in a word
before the crossover he’d better shake a leg and get over to Mr. Sweet’s house. All
the neighbors knew to come to our house if something was wrong with Mr. Sweet,
but they did not know how we always managed to make him well, or at least stop
him from dying, when he was so often near death. As soon as we heard the cry we
got up, my brother and I and my mother and father, and put on our clothes. We
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hurried out of the house and down the road for we were always afraid that we might
someday be too late, and Mr. Sweet would get tired of dallying.
When we got to the house, a very poor shack really, we found the front room
full of neighbors and relatives and someone met us at the door and said it was all
very sad that old Mr. Sweet Little (for Little was his family name, although we
mostly ignored it) was about to kick the bucket. My parents were advised not to take
my brother and me into the “death room,” seeing we were so young and all, but we
were so much more accustomed to the death room than he that we ignored him and
dashed in without giving his warning a second thought. I was almost in tears, for
these deaths upset me fearfully, and the thought of how much depended on me and
my brother (who was such a ham most of the time) made me very nervous.
The doctor was bending over the bed and turned back to tell us for at leas the
tenth time in the history of my family, that, alas, old Mr. Sweet Little was dying and
that children had best not see the face of implacable death (I didn’t know what
“implacable” was, but whatever it was, Mr. Sweet was not!). My father pushed his
rather abruptly out of the way saying, as he always did and very loudly for he was
saying it to Mr. Sweet,
“To hell with dying, man, these children want Mr. Sweet” – which was my cue to
throw myself upon the bed and kiss Mr. Sweet all around the whiskers and under
the eyes and around the collar of his nightshirt where he smelled so strongly of all
sorts of things, mostly liniment. I was very good at bringing him around, for as soon
as I saw that he was struggling to open his eyes I knew he was going to be all right,
and so could finish my revival sure of success. As soon as his eyes were open he
would begin to smile and that way I knew that I had surely won. Once, though, I got
a tremendous scare, for he could not open his eyes and later I learned that he had
had a stroke and that one side of his face was stiff and hard to get into motion. When
he began to smile I could tickle him in earnest because I was sure that nothing
would get in the way of his laughter, although once he began to cough so hard that
he almost threw me off his stomach, but that was when I was very small, little more
than a baby, and my bushy hair had gotten in his nose.
When we were sure he would listen to us we would ask him why he was in
bed and when he was coming to see us again and could we play his guitar, which
more than likely would be leaning against the bed. His eyes would get all misty and
he would sometimes cry out loud, but we never let it embarrass us, for he knew that
we loved him and that we sometimes cried too for no reason. My parents would
leave the room to just the three of us; Mr. Sweet, by that time, would be propped up
in bed with a number of pillows behind his head and with me sitting and lying on his
shoulder and along his chest.
Even when he had trouble breathing he would not ask me to get down.
Looking into my eyes he would shake his white head and run his scratchy old finger
all around my hairline, which was rather low down, nearly to my brows, and made
some people say I looked like a baby monkey.
My brother was very generous in all this, he let me do all the revivaling – he
had done it for years before I was born and so he was glad to be able to pass it on to
someone new. What he would do while I talked to Mr. Sweet was pretend to play the
guitar, in fact he pretended that he was a young version of Mr. Sweet, and it always
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made Mr. Sweet glad to think that someone wanted to be like him – of course, we did
not know this then, we played the thing by ear, and whatever we played he seemed
to like what we did. We were desperately afraid that he was just going to take off
one day and leave us.
It did not occur to us that we were doing anything special; we had not
learned that death was final when it did come. We thought nothing of triumphing
over it so many times, and in fact became a trifle contemptuous of people who let
themselves be carried away. It did not occur to us that if our father had been dying
we could not have stopped it, that Mr. Sweet was the only person over whom we had
power.
When Mr. Sweet was in his eighties I was studying in the university many
miles from home. I saw him whenever …
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