An Engineer's Best Friend

   So, we had an assignment called Style Academy. Jokingly, I assumed it'd be about how to dress and what not, especially since engineers' apparently don't know how to dress. (I don't know who assumed that.)  Anyways, here's basically what I liked and didn't like.

    I worked mainly on the sentence imitation assignment, which was nice, especially since as a writer, I'm always trying to expand my style. I liked that there were examples of sentences and then how it challenged us to do the same. However, the video was tedious and the gall gnats were kind of strange. I think style academy would be more effiecent if done in a more exciting way and also provided a transcript for students who like to read and analyze rather than just watch videos. Here are some of my examples! The numbered ones are the sentence by varying authors and a. is my imitiation.

1)      One times, as a child, in a power failure, his mother found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon.

a.       Marian thought back to the simpler times, where electricity wasn’t as prevalent, where her and her father could get lost for hours in the aviary, wandering around the choirs of birds, listening to the intimate conversations, and she desperately wished that those were the birds that surrounded her now.

2)      I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there’s gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning I tripped on the skateboard and by mistake I droped my seater in the sink while the water was running and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

a.       The sky was pitch black and the stars could hardly be seen with the canopy of trees and even the most bright fire could hardly been seen within ten paces and the guards didn’t know whether or not they should light more for easier sight and the enemy could be around them at any time.

3)      Everything could so easily lapse into nothingness, yet each year after the death of winter, trees sprout new leaves, the moon wanes but always waxes brilliantly once more, and the serpent, a universal symbol of initiation, sloughs off its old withered skin and comes forth gleaming and fresh.

a.       Marian should have slumped into the bed, yet days still came, duties still had to be performed, depression would set in but the maids always cheered her up, and the life of Mone-ma would still press on as if nothing had happened to change life as the Icari knew it.

4)      You hit the crash cymbal at the end of a fill, as a flourish, but also as a kind of announcement that time-out has, boringly enough, ended, and that the beat must go back to work.

a.       “You say you detest the way we have treated you, as a captive, but you have had our trust, deceptively, misused it, and for that you must be punished and treated like the traitor you are.”