Question 1

The last quiz looked at awkward repetition. Now we'll turn to effective repetition, or what we've been calling "rhetorical repetition."

Fill in the blanks below. The quotation comes from the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. The main character, a teenage boy named "Junior," is nervous about trying out for the school basketball team because he thinks he'll get cut. Here's what his father tells him:

"You have to dream ________ to get __________."

The same word goes in both slots.

Question 2

Which of the answers below do you think is an example of rhetorical repetition (as opposed to awkward repetition)?

"A bad cause will ever be supported by bad means and bad men; and whoever will be at the pains of examining strictly into things, will find that one and the same spirit of oppression and impiety, more or less, governs through your whole party in both countries." —Thomas Paine, "The American Crisis" (1775)

"This queasy sense of irresolution was only complicated by Gerry Adams’s refusal to acknowledge that he was ever in the IRA. If people in Northern Ireland were wondering whether it was safe, yet, to come clean about their own roles in the conflict, the continued denials by Adams would suggest that it most definitely wasn’t. 'O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,' Seamus Heaney wrote in a poem about the Troubles called 'Whatever You Say , Say Nothing.' There was a sense that, even as people greeted the new day with great enthusiasm, the sulfurous intrigue of the past would continue to linger." —Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2018)

"In Norway, in Oslo, in the city where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, on a Friday afternoon, a thirty-two-year-old man triggered a bomb at the government headquarters, killing eight people. On the small island of Utoya that same man killed sixty-nine people, most of them teenagers . . . After this tragedy, the king of Norway said, ' I remain convinced in the belief in freedom is stronger than fear. I remain convinced in the belief of an open Norwegian democracy and society. I remain convinced in the belief in our ability to live freely and and safely in our own country.'" —Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

All of the above

Question 3

The psychologist Donald Hebb is known for developing a theory of learning centered around the interaction of brain neurons. Here is a technical explanation of the theory from Hebb's 1949 book The Organization of Behavior .

When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.

A more common formulation, however, involves rhetorical repetition. Pick it from the list below.