The Absolute pg 139 in C.E.A.

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The Absolute (pg 139 in C.E.A.)

• AbP

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Here are some sentences written by professional
writers, but with parts left out

• She returned to her bench.
• The boy watched.
• About the bones, ants were ebbing away
• Six boys came over the hill half an hour early
  that afternoon running hard

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Now, compare those sentences with the originals.
Notice that the additions account for the
distinctiveness of the original sentences

• She returned to her bench, her face showing all
  the unhappiness that had suddenly overtaken her.
• - Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy
• The boy watched, his eyes bulging in the dark.
• - Edmund Ware An Underground Episode
• About the bones, ants were ebbing away, their
  pincers full of meat.
• - Doris Lessing African Stories
• Six boys came over the hill half an hour early
  that afternoon running hard, their heads down,
  their forearms working, their breath whistling.
• - John Steinbeck The Red Pony

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Defintion

• A two word combination.
• A noun and a ing or -ed verb added into a
  sentence.

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Example

• Instead of saying The cat climbed the tree, say
• Claws digging, feet kicking, the cat climbed the
  tree.

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Punctuation

• The AbP is always separated with a comma

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Characteristics

• Absolutes are sentence parts that describe the
  rest of the sentence in which they appear.
  Absolutes are almost complete sentences. As a
  test, you can make any absolute a sentence by
  adding was or were.
• Another way to identify an absolute is that many
  absolutes begin with the words my, his, her, its,
  our, their (possessive pronouns).
• Absolutes can function as sentence openers,
  subject-verb splits, or sentence closers.

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Sentence openers

• His hands raw, he reached for a flat place at the
  top.
• - Richard Connell The Most Dangerous Game
• Each child carrying his little bag of crackling,
  we trod the long road home in the cold winter
  afternoon.
• - Peter Abrahams Tell Freedom
• Outside, his carpetbag in his hand, he stood for
  a time in the barnyard.
• - Jessamyn West A Time for Learning

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Subject verb splits

• Miss Hearne, her face burning, hardly listened to
  those words.
• - Brian Moore The Lonely Passion of Judith
  Hearne
• High in the air, a little figure, his hands
  thrust in his short jacket pockets, stood staring
  out to sea.
• - Katherine Mansfield The Voyage
• An Arab on a motorcycle, his long robes flying in
  the wind of his speed, passed John at such a clip
  that the spirals of dust from his turnings on the
  road looked like little tornadoes
• - Elizabeth Yates Standing in Anothers Shoes

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Sentence closers

• She screamed for Klausshrieked for him-and Klaus
  came on a dead run, his work boots whitened by
  the half full pail of milk he had spilled on
  them.
• - Stephen King The Two Dead Girls
• He walked with a prim strut, swinging out his
  legs in a half-cirle with each step, his heels
  biting smartly into the red velvet carpet on the
  floor.
• - Carson McCullers The Jockey
• Those who had caught sharks had taken them to the
  shark factory on the other side of the cove where
  they were hoisted on a block and tackle, their
  livers removed, their fins cut off, their hides
  skinned out, and their flesh cut into strips for
  salting.
• - Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea