Style Study

Passages collected by Leah Zuidema for the study of rhetorical grammar, usage, and mechanics

1. It was Tuesday. My wife’s birthday. We were going out for dinner. Could I take her out for lunch too? She said she would like some pea soup. Bingo! I had certificates from a splendid emporium, way across town. Pea soup was on their menu for the day. I really think my wife said pea soup because she knows I like it. Nice wife. (by J.D. Eppinga,from "The Milk (Pea Soup) of Human Kindness")
   
   
2. Guided by the NAE's second "Statement of Conscience" of May 2002, evangelicals are playing a key role in protecting the tragic victims of mass starvation, concentration camps, gas chambers, and ceaseless persecutions of the lunatic regime of North Korea's Kim Jong II--an effort that will require and, I am supremely confident, will receive, the very best of your prayers and labors.
   
   They--you--are now working on legislation to protect the runaway girls caught at American bus stations, and the hundreds of thousands of girls and women trapped on the streets of America into lives of prostitution, routinely savage beatings, AIDS, and drug addiction. (by Jewish human rights activist Michael Horowitz, in his Christianity Today article "How to Win Friends and Influence Culture")
   
   
3. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with. . . . Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world. (by Amy Tan, in "Mother Tongue")
   
   
4. I remember particular people, like my mother's coworker Rose Goldstein, a gentle woman whose house across town we visited, and Bobbi, the new hire just out of high school, on whom I had a desperate crush. And there was a cook whose name I've forgotten, but who would sit in the booth on break, smoking, solemn, food splattered all over his white uniform, down to the shoes. At the back booth, you would catch the thick smell of the grill and the whiff of stale food and cigarettes, scraped and dumped. These odors hung in my mother's uniform and hair. When things got busy, there was a heightened clatter of kitchen and dishwasher, and I could feel the rise in the pulse of the place: the cacophony of customers' voices; waitresses weaving in and out, warning "behind you" in a voice both impassive and urgent; all these people eating separately in one big public space. (by Mike Rose, from the introduction to his book The Mind at Work)
   
   
5. Sometimes a time for writing is less a choice than a necessity. Roxanne, a professional woman, a mother, and a writer, was not finding much time for her writing. Then she began to make a ritual of the ten-minute bus ride to and from work. "My writing time," she says, "began at 8:30 a.m. each day when the bus pulled up and resumed at 5:30 p.m. in the afternoon when I made the trip home. I wrote a whole short story in these fifteen-minute intervals." (by Kathleen O'Shaughnessy, Connie McDonal, Harriet Maher, and Ann Dobie, from "Who What, When, and Where of Writing Rituals")
   
   
6. When you talk, your voice, with its pauses, stresses, rises, and falls, shows how you intend your words to fit together. When you write, punctuation marks are the road signs (stop, go, yield, slow, detour) that guide the reader, and you wouldn't be understood without them. (by Patricia T. O'Conner, from Woe is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English)
   
   
7. Frank was a guy who made it a point to know things; he read a lot and inquired until he understood how something worked. It felt good to be with him. I remember him, his well-spoken voice, guiding me through the Railroader's Museum: cutaways of running gear; diagrams and technical information on steam, diesel, and electric locomotives; photos of wooden freight cars, cabooses, the interiors of luxury passenger cars; posed workmen; lots of repair equipment; an operational model railroad. I knew of Frank's many complaints about the railroad: layoffs and erratic scheduling, the brutal hours, the biting cold or sweltering heat, the burns over his arms and legs. But Frank also saw himself as a "railroad man," someone who had made his contribution to this major American industry. Doing a job well mattered. "Work hard," he wrote to his son, away in the army. "No one likes a half-assed man." One of the moments I remember from that day at the museum, a simple but lasting one, is Frank standing before a display case, pointing to some miniature assembly of cable and gear, explaining in detail how it worked, taking his time until I got it. (by Mike Rose, from the introduction to his book The Mind at Work)

Created September 21, 2005
Updated August 21, 2006