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Thomas Paine and the Rhetoric of Common Sense — Homework
Reread the assigned Common Sense excerpt before answering.
- 1.Explain Paine's distinction between "society" and "government" in your own words.
- 2.Why does Paine write in plain, direct prose instead of the more elevated, classically referenced style common among elite political writers of his era?
- 3.About how many copies of Common Sense are estimated to have circulated, relative to the free colonial population at the time?
- 4.Restate Paine's "a continent governed by an island" argument as a short logical claim.
- 5.In five or more sentences, explain whether a text's enormous popularity is good evidence that its argument was correct, or only that it was persuasive, and whether you think those are the same thing.
🌲 Homeschool of the FutureEleventh Grade · Reading · week 8 homework