Serial Podcast
Contemporary Lit Serial Dir ections: Answer these questions and highlight the answer in yellow . Make sure you are following along with the podcast. 1. What does it mean when someone is “loosey-goosey” with details (8:09)? How is the denotation and connotation dif ferent from “lying” or “committing perjury”? 2. How is a “teeny weeny bag of marijuana” (6:58) dif ferent than “a small amount of drugs”? 3. What does the narrator mean when she says Adnan and his friends were “healthy American teenagers who were going to do what teenagers do, so long as they didn’t get caught” (10:00)? 4. The state portrays Adnan as “duplicitous.” Sarah and Saad phrase it dif ferently: “W e all grew up with that dual personality” that comes with being a “normal kid with immigrant parents” (10:00). What’ s the dif ference in denotation? What’ s the dif ference in connotation? Does this dif ference show up in your own life? 5. The narrator notes that Adnan was asleep when the cops arrested him and took him to the interrogation room (12:32). Why does this detail matter in an artistic sense? (What would be lost if she just started the scene in the interrogation room?) 6. The narrator describes Adnan as having “big brown eyes, like a dairy cow” (19:45). What is the connotative meaning of this? 7. Look at your answers to the previous questions in this section. What is the cumulative impact of the narrator ’s diction? In other words, can you detect a bias in her description, or a way that she wants the listener to react?