Style In Writing: Horror Story At The Lonely Lake
How does style create meaning? This is the question that we wanted to figure out from the first lesson. As you said, this prompt was hard to answer. People had discussed for hundreds of years. When I first saw this prompt, I was really confused and had many question about this prompt. The first and the most important thing about the prompt is what is style? The style in writing is the way the author write the passage. The tone, the punctuation and the rhetoric are all included in style. After knowing the meaning of the word, “style”, we didn’t begin to analyze the prompt itself, instead we began to analyze the rhythm of the story which is Horror Story at the Lonely Lake. This is quite a reasonable way to solve the problem because rhythm is
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one of the parts of style. It is very hard to find out how does style create meaning because the prompt is too big and it is very hard to deal with but beginning with a small part of the style works well to solve the problem. Those essay you gave us to analyze are very tricky.
The story, A Poetics for Bullies written by Elkin, has a very special style which is much different from normal story so we can find out his style and the effect of his style easily. The tone, the punctuation in the story is so unique that when I read the first sentence, I was shocked. “I'm Push the bully, and what I hate are new kids and sissies, dumb kids and smart, rich kids, poor kids, kids who wear glasses, talk funny, show off, patrol boys and wise guys and kids who pass pencils and water the plants — and cripples, especially cripples. I love nobody loved.” As a beginning sentence, it is very wild. Everything is different from the details in the normal five paragraphs essay that we wrote before. The continuous commas and adjectives made me shocked by his momentum and made me really wanted to keep reading to see what will happen next. Those effects answer how style creates meaning exactly. To figure out the answer deeper, I began to imitate the style of Elkin.
It seems easy to imitate Elkin’s style but the fact is totally different. Elkin’s style is so special and we can find out easily but precisely because it is so special, it really hard to change my accustomed style to his special style. One of the best part of the story written by Elkin is that, “His chin is always chapped. I tell him he has to drink a lot because he loses so much water…… He gulps hard. ‘Push, this is a kid and a half. Wait, you'll see.’…… ‘He's got this funny accent — you could die.’ Excited, he tamps at his mouth like a diner, a tubercular.” From his description, I can almost see Eugene and I feel he is right in front of me. “His chin is always chapped.” This sentence uses a fantastic sensory description about Eugene’s chin. I can touch his chapped chin and I can see the cracked skin. It was so real. The feeling is like a real feeling. I decided to focus on this style and used this in my story, so I wrote this paragraph in SSI, “He raises his head, looks up slowly and looks at the road. Light is poured down to the road. The road is so bright like a road to heaven. Wang stands on the road, and stands.” A description about that the character who is poor and has no place to live in an unfamiliar city, was expelled by police in the night. “Light is poured down to the road” shows the surrounding around the character. We can see that in the dark night, a bunch of light emitted to the road by a light and we feel we are standing on the street in a dark night. All those sensory descriptions can touch our heart and let us immerse in the reading and our imaginations. After learning the manifesto, I strengthened my idea that the sensory description is an important part of style creates meaning.
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism is the first manifesto we have learned and is also my favorite manifesto. In my sight, though this manifesto is against humanity, I love this manifesto very much because of its style which is also a special style, because of the sensory description. “We want to sing about the love of danger, about the use of energy and recklessness as common, daily practice.” This is the first paragraph of the manifesto and it goes straight to the main point. They love danger. They sing the love of danger. They change their love to a beautiful song. Maybe no one believe them. Maybe be everyone considers they are madman but they don’t care. They still sing the divine song in their hearts. I am touch by the first sentence of the manifesto when I read it. It is so beautiful and so gorgeous. When I analyze why this sentence is so powerful, I find that it is because of the sensory description. Singing, a miracle of human’s ability. When I hear a beautiful song, I will enjoy it. When I hear they are singing the love of danger I also enjoy it. Because they descript their love as a song, I begin to enjoy their love and try to accept their views though the views are very crazy and nonsense. Because I was touched by the sensory description, I began to use in my style manifesto. I not only sing my belief, but also praise it. Sanctioning the tricky advertisements is the theme of my manifesto. We contact with advertisements everywhere in our daily life. Advertisements are on the road, on the internet and in the beginning of videos. The most important thing about the advertisements is that they waste our much time every day. When I once watched a complete movie on the TV, I used three hours, however, the movie itself was just one and a half hour. Yes, the rest of time was to watch advertisements. That sounds crazy but it is true. Advertisements waste our so much time but we hardly notice that. So I wrote a manifesto about advertisement. “We praise the sanction of advertisements. Every second is the most important to our lives. We cannot let the advertisement engulfs our lives. We sing the love of justice and we believe that the decreasing of advertisements can make a better life.” The paragraph which is adapted from my manifesto tries to imitate the style of futurism manifesto. Readers can feel my faith of sanction of advertisements by the sensory description.
Impressed by the sensory description so much, I decided to make it as the main point in my final essay.
Just like the processes I find sensory description from the public writings, you gave me the same advice about how to develop the final essay in the conference which made me suddenly realized how to deal with the essay. During the conference, you made an example about how to make a detective film. You said that we cannot tell who the murderer is at the beginning of the film, instead, we need to find many clues and connect those clue to find the result. We may find a cloth at the crime scene and find out that it is his brother’s cloth but his brother also cannot be the murderer. We may find other clues from his brother and find out who the murderer is in the end. We need to lead the reader step by step to reach our goal, so I improved my essay using this strategy--I wrote an interesting store to attract readers and made it as a foreshadowing to lead to my main point like the beginning of Baxter’s passage. Another big challenge was how to write an essay not in five paragraphs form. To avoid this problem, I focused on the connection between each paragraph. The five paragraph essay doesn’t have connection between each paragraph and its main paragraphs are in parallel. So I made some delicate connections in my essay: I wrote a real life story of me at the beginning and analyzed one of dialogue in it to find the effect of sensory descriptions. Then I extended to our daily life …show more content…
and found out the effect of sensory descriptions in our daily life. From the daily life experience I develop my essay to the most important part--sensory description can make people impressed in daily life and it can also make people impressed with the writer’s story, which answers the question: how does style create meaning.
After finishing lots of work of our class, I begin to realize that your purpose is not to let us to find out the answer to the question, “how does style create meaning”, but to give us some important abilities.
One of the abilities is to have strong capacity to improve our works. We did many drafts for one essay and we made 80 percent, even 200 percent change each draft. This is what we learned—the strong capacity to improve. And this is why every conference is very important. The goal of conferences is to improve our works. I felt that I gain much knowledge in the fifteen minutes conference every time because I learned how to make revision of my essay clearly. We were divided into two groups to debate. No matter we were the first group to debate or the second group, when I saw the annotations on everyone’s paper, I got to know that we had learnt from the other group and we could improve our debate
skill.
Another ability is that we can understand voice, tone, and style, and can imitate stylistic techniques to suit the situation at hand. We have imitated many writers’ style to write passage. The goal is not to imitate but to use those good techniques in our daily writing and make them become parts of our own style. The dialogue with decent description of A Poetics for Bullies makes me impressed with the Push’s image. The momentum words and sentences in Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism convinces me that we need the love of danger and we need the use of energy. Those are all good techniques we can use in our own writings.
Analysis is also an important ability we have learnt. “Analysis cannot shorter than quotation” is the demand of our writings. Too much quotation will make evidence far from the main point. We need to use analysis to show that the example can prove the main point.
one of the parts of style. It is very hard to find out how does style create meaning because the prompt is too big and it is very hard to deal with but beginning with a small part of the style works well to solve the problem. Those essay you gave us to analyze are very tricky.
The story, A Poetics for Bullies written by Elkin, has a very special style which is much different from normal story so we can find out his style and the effect of his style easily. The tone, the punctuation in the story is so unique that when I read the first sentence, I was shocked. “I'm Push the bully, and what I hate are new kids and sissies, dumb kids and smart, rich kids, poor kids, kids who wear glasses, talk funny, show off, patrol boys and wise guys and kids who pass pencils and water the plants — and cripples, especially cripples. I love nobody loved.” As a beginning sentence, it is very wild. Everything is different from the details in the normal five paragraphs essay that we wrote before. The continuous commas and adjectives made me shocked by his momentum and made me really wanted to keep reading to see what will happen next. Those effects answer how style creates meaning exactly. To figure out the answer deeper, I began to imitate the style of Elkin.
It seems easy to imitate Elkin’s style but the fact is totally different. Elkin’s style is so special and we can find out easily but precisely because it is so special, it really hard to change my accustomed style to his special style. One of the best part of the story written by Elkin is that, “His chin is always chapped. I tell him he has to drink a lot because he loses so much water…… He gulps hard. ‘Push, this is a kid and a half. Wait, you'll see.’…… ‘He's got this funny accent — you could die.’ Excited, he tamps at his mouth like a diner, a tubercular.” From his description, I can almost see Eugene and I feel he is right in front of me. “His chin is always chapped.” This sentence uses a fantastic sensory description about Eugene’s chin. I can touch his chapped chin and I can see the cracked skin. It was so real. The feeling is like a real feeling. I decided to focus on this style and used this in my story, so I wrote this paragraph in SSI, “He raises his head, looks up slowly and looks at the road. Light is poured down to the road. The road is so bright like a road to heaven. Wang stands on the road, and stands.” A description about that the character who is poor and has no place to live in an unfamiliar city, was expelled by police in the night. “Light is poured down to the road” shows the surrounding around the character. We can see that in the dark night, a bunch of light emitted to the road by a light and we feel we are standing on the street in a dark night. All those sensory descriptions can touch our heart and let us immerse in the reading and our imaginations. After learning the manifesto, I strengthened my idea that the sensory description is an important part of style creates meaning.
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism is the first manifesto we have learned and is also my favorite manifesto. In my sight, though this manifesto is against humanity, I love this manifesto very much because of its style which is also a special style, because of the sensory description. “We want to sing about the love of danger, about the use of energy and recklessness as common, daily practice.” This is the first paragraph of the manifesto and it goes straight to the main point. They love danger. They sing the love of danger. They change their love to a beautiful song. Maybe no one believe them. Maybe be everyone considers they are madman but they don’t care. They still sing the divine song in their hearts. I am touch by the first sentence of the manifesto when I read it. It is so beautiful and so gorgeous. When I analyze why this sentence is so powerful, I find that it is because of the sensory description. Singing, a miracle of human’s ability. When I hear a beautiful song, I will enjoy it. When I hear they are singing the love of danger I also enjoy it. Because they descript their love as a song, I begin to enjoy their love and try to accept their views though the views are very crazy and nonsense. Because I was touched by the sensory description, I began to use in my style manifesto. I not only sing my belief, but also praise it. Sanctioning the tricky advertisements is the theme of my manifesto. We contact with advertisements everywhere in our daily life. Advertisements are on the road, on the internet and in the beginning of videos. The most important thing about the advertisements is that they waste our much time every day. When I once watched a complete movie on the TV, I used three hours, however, the movie itself was just one and a half hour. Yes, the rest of time was to watch advertisements. That sounds crazy but it is true. Advertisements waste our so much time but we hardly notice that. So I wrote a manifesto about advertisement. “We praise the sanction of advertisements. Every second is the most important to our lives. We cannot let the advertisement engulfs our lives. We sing the love of justice and we believe that the decreasing of advertisements can make a better life.” The paragraph which is adapted from my manifesto tries to imitate the style of futurism manifesto. Readers can feel my faith of sanction of advertisements by the sensory description.
Impressed by the sensory description so much, I decided to make it as the main point in my final essay.
Just like the processes I find sensory description from the public writings, you gave me the same advice about how to develop the final essay in the conference which made me suddenly realized how to deal with the essay. During the conference, you made an example about how to make a detective film. You said that we cannot tell who the murderer is at the beginning of the film, instead, we need to find many clues and connect those clue to find the result. We may find a cloth at the crime scene and find out that it is his brother’s cloth but his brother also cannot be the murderer. We may find other clues from his brother and find out who the murderer is in the end. We need to lead the reader step by step to reach our goal, so I improved my essay using this strategy--I wrote an interesting store to attract readers and made it as a foreshadowing to lead to my main point like the beginning of Baxter’s passage. Another big challenge was how to write an essay not in five paragraphs form. To avoid this problem, I focused on the connection between each paragraph. The five paragraph essay doesn’t have connection between each paragraph and its main paragraphs are in parallel. So I made some delicate connections in my essay: I wrote a real life story of me at the beginning and analyzed one of dialogue in it to find the effect of sensory descriptions. Then I extended to our daily life …show more content…
and found out the effect of sensory descriptions in our daily life. From the daily life experience I develop my essay to the most important part--sensory description can make people impressed in daily life and it can also make people impressed with the writer’s story, which answers the question: how does style create meaning.
After finishing lots of work of our class, I begin to realize that your purpose is not to let us to find out the answer to the question, “how does style create meaning”, but to give us some important abilities.
One of the abilities is to have strong capacity to improve our works. We did many drafts for one essay and we made 80 percent, even 200 percent change each draft. This is what we learned—the strong capacity to improve. And this is why every conference is very important. The goal of conferences is to improve our works. I felt that I gain much knowledge in the fifteen minutes conference every time because I learned how to make revision of my essay clearly. We were divided into two groups to debate. No matter we were the first group to debate or the second group, when I saw the annotations on everyone’s paper, I got to know that we had learnt from the other group and we could improve our debate
skill.
Another ability is that we can understand voice, tone, and style, and can imitate stylistic techniques to suit the situation at hand. We have imitated many writers’ style to write passage. The goal is not to imitate but to use those good techniques in our daily writing and make them become parts of our own style. The dialogue with decent description of A Poetics for Bullies makes me impressed with the Push’s image. The momentum words and sentences in Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism convinces me that we need the love of danger and we need the use of energy. Those are all good techniques we can use in our own writings.
Analysis is also an important ability we have learnt. “Analysis cannot shorter than quotation” is the demand of our writings. Too much quotation will make evidence far from the main point. We need to use analysis to show that the example can prove the main point.