pg.269, 4th paragraph:
- Punctuation: The author uses the punctuation in a normal way, with a lot of commas. In several parts she uses the symbol --. I believe that the author uses -- to give the reader an explanation of what she has previoulsy written. For example, Livia, one of the characters is saying "All her life she'd turned to food to fix things -- when she was down, or lonely, or bored, or sick". Using the -- after the first sentence, helped the reader get a better idea of what the author meant, when Livia was talking how food gave her an outlet. It also gave us a more in depth view on how many people depend on food to help them with their serious emotions.
- Sentence length- The sentences vary from 8 to 24 words, throughout the paragraph the author uses medium long sentences. The last sentence is the longest out of the other ones in the passage; I believe the author made it the longest because she was trying to summarize everything they talked about in the passage in one sentence.
- Devices: The author had a combination of independent clauses and dependent clauses throughout the passage. When it came to conjunctions De la cruz, likes to put "or" a lot.
- Sentence beginnings: Th author begins each sentence differently. The very first sentence is started with it being italicized, maybe to show how serious this passage in the page is going to be.
- Syntax: For this passage, the syntax tends to stay the same in my point of view, except maybe just in the beginning where the words are italicized.
- Evaluate: I think making the first sentence, "How wonderful not to think of food as a guilty pleasure" italicized makes it easier for the the reader to know in advance that this passage is going to have a deeper message than the other paragraphs in the page.