My hope is that impressing upon those students the fact that great writing begins with great sentences, and that starting an essay with a great sentence sets us up for success will lead to fewer "wasted" sentences that are mostly the writer stumbling around looking for a way to express an emotion or reaction or observation. How many times have you encountered a piece of writing with a great opening sentence that just doesn't go anywhere. Those opening sentences are the engines that drive good writing.
From Bruni (and his many readers):
Olivia Nuzzi’s spirited end-of-2022 look at the spiritless Mar-a-Loco launch of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign in New York magazine: “On the day he announced his candidacy this past November, the air was heavy with oleander and snipped greenery and sea mist colliding with mold and wood polish and hotel soap and the metallic vapor of Diet Coke and the alcoholic ferment of generations of cougars in Chanel No. 5.”
The above example is clearly dependent upon sensory details and includes some caustic observations that are anything but "objective," even if they help readers better visualize the scene.
Next is from an opinion piece in which The Economist contextualized the hubbub over Elon Musk, Twitter and permitted versus censored tweets with this finely turned wisdom: “Free expression is not a problem with a solution bounded by the laws of physics that can be hacked together if only enough coders pull an all-nighter. It is a dilemma requiring messy trade-offs that leave no one happy. In such a business, humility and transparency count for a lot.”
The wisdom here mostly that complex problems require complex solutions, and that truth lies at the heart of a college education and all the varying ideas and possibilities that we encounter in a community packed with research and analysis and deep dives into sometimes obscure topics.
In The Denver Herald, Kirsten Dahl Collins recalled the unusual beginnings of a Colorado church: “In the summer of 1860, four armed desperadoes invaded the offices of the newly launched Rocky Mountain News in Denver, gunning for editor William N. Byers. Luckily for the journalist, two Presbyterians walked in.”
Now, who wouldn't want to read on to discover what happened next? This is clearly the opening sentence for a longer piece. It caught my eye partly due to the reference to departed Rocky Mountain News, which I subscribed to until its closing, but I also was intrigued by the feeling that armed gunmen with a grudge might invade almost any place of business today. We don't have to live in the Wild West... or maybe that is the heart of America's love affair with guns.
In an article in The Atlantic titled “The End of the Silicon Valley Myth,” Brian Merchant wrote: “You can just feel it, the cumulative weight of this stagnation, in the tech that most of us encounter every day. The act of scrolling past the same dumb ad to peer at the same bad news on the same glass screen on the same social network: This is the stuck future. There is a sense that we have reached the end of the internet, and no one wants to be left holding the bag.”
I see that tech firms are shedding workers at a high rate due to the economy slowing, not to mention over-hiring during the pandemic. Is the internet near its end? Hardly, but the writer's view is that it has matured to the point where it's getting closer to, say, the Law & Order glut of shows that fill hours and hours of broadcast time each night. Or perhaps it's like cable news, which rehashes and repackages outrage over and over, to the point where it all seems like meaningless background noise. Yes, it's all outrageous... so what?
And Megan Stack plumbed the lows of our country’s perpetual sugar high: “If America’s candy culture is a symptom, then we adults must be the disease — frightened for the future, harried by daily cares, snatching up a cheap simulacrum of happiness that’s already melting once it hits the tongue.”
Diction choices tend to honor the expectations writers have of their audiences -- here, the writer seems to expect we will all understand "simulacrum." Readers can get a basic sense of the word's definition from context and the hint of "simulation" somewhere in the root. It means a representation of something or someone.
Sometimes writers can push the envelope, so to speak, seeking to expand the vocabular of readers. I often did that in the high school English classroom, showing students how more advanced words might work in practice (and usually trying to provide some clues as to meaning).
But sometimes student writers grab a thesaurus (or just go online for the equivalent) and choose a synonym for some word they sense is overused and choose something almost randomly. That gets criticized as using a "twenty-five cent word when a nickel word will do").
I look forward to picking just a couple of the examples above and really digging into the types of choices the writers made, and perhaps exploring options.
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