Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Good Vs. Bad sentences in The Human Condition

In my opinion, an example of good sentence in The Human Condition can be found on pg. 38 when Arendt explains that in the past the private sphere essentially meant exclusion from the public. Slaves, for example, were only allowed in the private sphere. "The decisive historical fact is that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authentically related." This particular passage struck me because, although long, it nicely concludes a paragraph and avoids "run-on" tendencies the author exhibits in similar efforts to round out a point. For an example of a bad sentence, I sort of struggled. While Arendt does have some long convoluted explanations, there were none that really lost me. After re-reading the paragraph before and concentrating on the context, I found I understood the arguments even if I didn't necessarily agree.

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