A Priceless Lesson In Humility Analysis

After reading “A Priceless Lesson in Humility” by Felipe Morales from NPR’s This I Believe series, I found that this piece of writing would be beneficial for students who would read and analyze it. This essay effectively explains how the writer was reminded of why he came to believe in humility through a series of past personal experiences, and later, in an incident with an elderly blind woman. In his sightseeing trip to Washington, D.C., Morales acted with prejudice when an elderly blind woman had asked for help. He had got lost in the American middle-class, which led him to lose his belief in humility. After the incident, he was re-awakened to his core belief in humility. By studying Morales’s essay closely, students would be able to see how he distinguishes between hyphens …show more content…
Morales’s essay correctly demonstrates the usage of hyphens and dashes, which will help students in their writing. He uses hyphens to create adjectives in such phrases as “no-nonsense mother”, “re-awakened my core belief”, and “my self-induced blindness” (Morales1-2). Holdridge (a writer with degrees for English literature and creative writing) states that a hyphen is used, “when joining words together in order to act as an adjective before a noun.”(Holdridge 1). Each hyphenated word that Morales includes in his essay satisfies this rule. Additionally after reading Morales’s essay, students will notice that he knows when to include dashes. In “Punctuation Marks: The Difference Between Dashes and Hyphens”, Donovan explains that dashes are “used to