Several varied honorees this week, beginning with an irresistible pun.
In The New Yorker, Jill Lepore described the return of the wild turkey: “In New England, the birds were once hunted nearly to extinction; now they’re swarming the streets like they own the place. Sometimes turnabout is fowl play.”
Fair vs. foul... transformed into "fowl." Such wordplay is not suitable for lots of more serious reporting, but a lot of our school reporting could benefit from sounding a bit more like students: silly and smart in equal measure.
The next example is opinion, but uses the walking in circles metaphor to characterize lack of political will to change the nation's appalling murder rate.
Also in The New Yorker, Jesse Dorris visited a recently opened memorial to the 20 children and six adults who were fatally shot at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., about a decade ago: “It is only fitting that a visitor to the Sandy Hook memorial walks in circles; we are all trapped in a loop of carnage, campaign donations, thoughts and prayers.”
A tightly constructed sentence can serve as a lead that cuts to the core of the issue.
In The Times, Michael Wilson reflected on the occurrence of three mass shootings just before Thanksgiving: “Yesterday’s parents, children and friends became Thursday’s empty chairs.”
Many students will recognize the underlying emotions of this sentence that tries to recapture some of the agony of forced lessons, whether they be for piano or violin or swimming.
Ruth Whippman described her long-ago piano lessons: “I can still conjure up the chemical overload of my teacher’s after-shave — synthetic floral with a base note of trickle-down economics. Overpowering, but not quite able to drown out the background scent of my mother’s expectations.”
Sports writers often make use of allusions beyond sports, and this one may reflect what fans of the L.A. Rams are feeling this year after their 3-8 start to the season. I was thinking we might do a quick edit and make this work in describing the way the Broncos have fallen off the cliff after such high expectations over the summer.
Mike Tanier mulled the Los Angeles Rams’ dismal drop-off from their championship season last year: “The Rams aren’t just enduring a Super Bowl hangover. They have woken up next to a total stranger in a Nevada honeymoon suite with an empty wallet and no sign of their car keys.”
Back to sports for a fun simile that assumes the reader has actually seen a bullet train, either in person or on screen. And the U.S. is off to the elimination round in the World Cup this week.
Andrew Das described a Brazil player’s winning goal against Switzerland: “It was off his foot so fast, and was so well-placed, that the Swiss goalkeeper could only watch it pass like a man admiring a bullet train from the platform.”
We are smart to remind our journalism students that all the fancy figures of speech they have been studying in ELA classes can effectively transfer to their reporting, and can delight readers.
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