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Interactions 2 Writing, 4/e
Cheryl Pavlik
Margaret Keenan Segal

Lifestyles Around the World

Identifying Digressions

Each paragraph below contains a digression. Write the number of the sentence where the digression begins and ends.



1

Paragraph A The digression begins in sentence no. and ends in sentence no. .

1. One day my sister and I were playing outside when a strange dog came into our yard. 2. He was a large dog, but he looked very friendly. 3. In fact, he looked a little like our dog Gino, who had died the year before. 4. Everyone was very sad when Gino died because we had had him since he was a puppy. 5. He slept on my bed every night. 6. I cried myself to sleep every night for a week after Gino died. 7. My sister ran up to pet the strange dog. 8. She must have scared him because he started growling and jumped on her. 9. He bit her badly on the arm, and my mother had to take her to the doctor.

2

Paragraph B The digression begins in sentence no. and ends in sentence no. .

1. This incident didn't happen to me. 2. It happened to my mother when she was a teenager. 3. One day her friend Marta called her and invited her to go to the movies that night with her and her cousin Marco, who was visiting from another town. 4. My mother agreed, but a few hours later Marta called to say that she was sick. 5. She had a bad case of the flu. 6. Lots of people got the flu that winter. 7. In fact, my mother got it the very next day ! 8. Even though Marta couldn't go, Marco still wanted to go to the movies. 9. A new James Bond movie was playing, and he was very anxious to see it. 10. My mother didn't know what to do. 11. She was very shy, and she didn't want to go out with a boy that she didn't know. 12. In the end, she went and I'm glad that she did. 13. A few years later, she and Marco were married. 14. If she hadn't taken a chance, she might not have met my father!