Bradford’s Writing Style

Bradford's writing is embedded with many rhetorical devices that writers use today.

This is called writers' style.

Let's look at some of the devices Bradford incorporated into Of Plymouth Plantation. You can use other writers' styles and techniques as a model for your own writing.

To begin, you will examine the two writing techniques below.

Parallelism

Passive Voice

 

Parallelism allows writers to create long sentences without them seeming too long-winded.

Hold your arms straight up in the air like the football player in the picture. Your arms are parallel.

Keeping words, phrases, and sentences parallel means to keep items in a sentence grammatically the same or similar in their construction, sound, or meaning.

 

Read the sentence below.

Which parts of the sentence do you think are parallel?

 

"They had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or to refresh their weather-beaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair, to seek for succor."

 

Let's try another.

"So some of the cheefe [chief] of the company, perceiving the mariners to feare the suffisience of the ship, as appeared by their mutterings, they entred into serious consultation... to consider in time of the danger; and rather to returne them to cast them selves into a desperate and inevitable peril."

 

Passive voice occurs when the subject does not complete the action; it receives the action.

For example, look at this sentence and select the subject. The subject is not completing the action.

The tools were stolen by the Native Americans.

What is the subject?

Answer: The word tools is the subject of the sentence, but it is not performing the action.

 

If we were to change the sentence to active voice, the subject would complete the action.

Now, look at this sentence and select the subject.

 

The Native Americans stole the tools.

What is the subject?

Answer: The subject is Native Americans. This sentence is an active voice because the Native Americans stole the tools.

 

identify the words in this sentence that indicate the use of passive voice. Then, edit the sentence in the textbox below, changing it to active voice. Check your answer.

"There was also found two of their [the Indians'] houses covered with mats, and sundry of their implements in them, but the people were run away and could not be seen."

Answer: Active Sentences: *the Pilgrims found two of the Indians' houses covered with mats.

*The Indians ran away.