Analyzing great passages can lead to stronger essays

I subscribe to several e-newsletter and bloggers, many of whom seem to collect cool sample sentences and passages, and today's post from Frank Bruni is full of writing to savor and analyze. Here are three passages with a few thoughts on each:

"It was the longest day of the year, and the Irish Sea had a metallic tint. The waves were tiny but insistent, like uncooperative children."

 passage from a profile by D.T. Max published in The New Yorker

That second sentence features both a bit of personification (insistent waves) and a simile (comparing those waves to children). That specific description of the water's surface helps set the scene.

From Jason Gay, writing in The Wall Street Journal, on Russian tennis champion Daniil Medvedev: "A 6-foot-6 collection of arms, legs, and wondrously unorthodox strokes, Medvedev swinging away on the baseline can look like someone at a picnic batting away flies."

This sentence features a nice use of the "rule of three," where a series of three seems to be a good place to start when you are trying to prove a point, and the series ENDS with the key descriptor, which combines an adverb and adjective before the noun "strokes." And the following sentence includes another simile, comparing the tennis player's actions to a well-known image.

"It's no accident that Trump's favorite outlet was Twitter: the medium is perfect for people who think in spasms, speak in grunts, emote with insults, and salute with hashtags."

by Bret Stephens, in the New York Times

Nice use of a colon here, moving the reader from a general observation to the more specific descriptions. I was a little surprised to see that the writer went with FOUR in the series, as opposed to three. Still seems to work, perhaps because each item in the series is so short. But what I really admired was the parallel constructions, built on verb + preposition + noun.

These example sentences all are carefully crafted, with each word doing its job. They are all cumulative sentences, meaning they build momentum and push the power of the passages to the end. 

That syntactical choice has a long history. Think of St. Paul writing about faith, hope, and love, with love being the most important of the three nouns in the series. 

I spend a lot of time urging writers to pay special attention to how they START their essays and posts. But we all need to realize that how we STOP is important. 

In-person classes are sort of like that. Good teachers find ways to focus on how the period begins and ends, and try not to slowly ease into a lesson as well as wrapping things up that goes beyond: "oh, there's the bell..."