2007 Ap English Language and Composition Free-Response Question #2

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In Stay Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, an essay that serves to respond to an essay by Salman Rushdie, Scott Russell Sanders used parallelism and metaphors to emphasize his beliefs that migration causes “disastrous consequences for the earth and for ourselves.” Sanders believes that “by settling in, we have a chance of making a durable home for ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our descendants.” The use of parallelism throughout Sanders’ essay was to emphasize his counter argument made by Rushdie. Rushdie articulates “that uprootings brings tolerance, while rootedness breeds intolerance; that imaginary homelands are preferable to geographical ones; that to be modern, enlightened, fully of our time is to be displaced,” showing that migration is good,in Rushdie’s perspective. Although we don’t know Sanders’ background, it is easy to speculate Rushdie’s perspective since he is a writer who migrated from India to England. If Rushdie believed that he disliked migration and had the same beliefs as Sanders, he would be contradicting his own actions. Sanders believes Rushdie’s beliefs are an “orthodoxy that... [Sanders]... wish[es] to encounter,” stating his belief that migration only harms the environment, not only to the creatures around us, but to ourselves as well. Sanders uses a metaphor in his essay to emphasize his beliefs that migration is harmful; “the habit … has been to force identical schemes onto differing locales, as though the mind were a cookie-cutter and the land were dough.” The author states that the “mind” is a “cookie-cutter” demonstrating that the industry and commerce believe that every place is the same and could be treated exactly the same as the town next door, explaining the meaning of the “land” being the “dough.” Sanders believes there needs to be respect for the places they live. Different land cannot be treated the same as another

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