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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage is about an act of deliberate memory-making, and it is worth close study because it shows a child doing a kind of writing children are rarely shown doing in fiction: copying down someone else's words so they can become hers. Notice the progression of verbs: 'wrote down,' 'read out loud,' 'memorized.' Each verb is a further act of possession. Writing is the first stage (getting the words out of the preacher's mouth and into permanent form); reading aloud is the second (making them live in the air); memorizing is the third (making them live inside her head). Notice also the rhythmic phrase 'just the way he said them to me.' This is a declaration of fidelity — Opal refuses to edit her father's words, even to make them prettier. The passage is a portrait of a child who understands that memory is fragile and that the best way to preserve something important is to write it down in the exact words of the person who said it. This is also a quiet lesson in how writers themselves work: the best writers take dictation from the world, and they take it faithfully.
I went right back to my room and wrote down all ten things that the preacher had told me. I wrote them down just the way he said them to me so that I wouldn't forget them, and then I read them out lou...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell the chapter. Then analyze the order in which the preacher delivers the 10 things — not the order of the list but the order of the telling. Why does this specific order matter?
Discussion Questions
- The 10 things are not in any obvious order — not chronological, not emotional, not physical-to-spiritual. They come out in the order the preacher happens to remember them. Why does DiCamillo refuse to impose a tidier structure on the list? What would the chapter lose if the preacher had organized his memories into 'things that delighted me' and 'things that hurt me'?
- Number 8 ('she hated being a preacher's wife') is the first real clue about why Opal's mother left. But DiCamillo places it deep in the list, after the funny items and before the drinking. Why is the single most important piece of information about the mother's departure buried in the middle of the list rather than saved for the end?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
faithfulness to the exact form of a thing — refusing to improve it, summarize it, or prettify it
Item 2
the act of making something your own, whether through writing, memory, or care
Item 3
the act of leaving someone who depended on you, without returning — a specific form of loss that differs from death in keeping the possibility of return alive
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Critical Thinking
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