Toomer

It was poetic and had a folksy tone with use of fragments. It was almost like gossip. There is repetition like “oh pines, whisper to Jesus.” Alliteration like “Even the pineS were Stale, sickly, like the Smell of food that makes you Sick.” It had literal poems wrapped into the prose. Even the dialogue kept this poetic/folksy feel. The last excerpt took a surreal turn mentions of “passionate blood leaps back into their eyeballs.” Come to think of it, all of the writing had a dream-like quality, something about the Becky story struck me as a quite dream world. Perhaps it was all the mentions of death and graveyards. For some reason I thought the writing sounded very feminine. I was surprised when I found out the author was a male. Perhaps starting off reading the Becky story, which talks about motherhood, threw me off. but learning of his mixed heritage made that story make more sense as to why it sounded so detached yet personal. Whatever the case I took his style to be romantic, dreamy and conversational.

Roth

His style has a lot of questions and reptitions. He uses a lot of "un" words like "undiluted" and "unbashed." He said the old jewish community were "undereducated and overburned," using oppisites to show a related dreary condition. Plenty of variation between long and short sentences. Actually, his longest sentences are almost always next to his shortest and vice versa. His style fits in the middle. He has some more academic word choice like "indomitable." He also over-killed the point about how important Swede was to the commnity. Just as I was about to get bored on the 6th paragraph he stopped. I noticed almost every senence follows the next by mentioning the same subject. Like in the paragraph where he's talking about The Kid, there is a follow. Kind of like a succession of themes. There are a lot of oneomapias. There is a definate sense that this is all a story based on the narrator's memory. Some of it is first person, but most is third. It's hard to say if I liked the story or not because it's just an except, but I think it's obvious something is going to happen to Swede. It's also interesting to note how he's called "The Swede" as if he is more than a person, he is a thing. A symbol for the community. And a "fettered" symbol at that.

Sigmund

The French feminist author saw him as hesitant, but I think he is pretty straightforward. He just likes to use a lot of fancy sentences to lead you there. His style is mostly high. However, I will agree that he is a “capricious stage setter.” He talks in third person in the beginning, then takes authority in using I and directly judging jigdinh Jentsch as “quite right.” He seems to bring things out of nowhere at times, especially when he’s driving home his ideas. He then takes the authority to say there only two ways to look at uncanny. And he does, as she wrote, “justify himself to the point of exoneration.”

He uses a lot of alliteration, which surprised me. Here are some examples:
“naturally not” “particular province” “rather remote” “quality in question”


“We know from psycho-analytic experience […] that fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes is terrible one in children.” what experience is he talking about? Wouldn’t adults be just as fearful? Most kids I know don’t even think about loosing their eyes. How does he jump from that to castration? Does he think that because people are blind they are scared that they won’t be able to see when someone is hacking off their penis? What about women? Do we have this fear of castration?

Funny how he brings us no statistics and only references to someone else’s fiction. He does not even offer a thought experiment or other possibilities. He believes in what he says and to him the world is very clearly organized and explainable, and because he believes in what he says so strongly, he expects us to do the same.

There “seems” to be a contradiction, but then he tries to convince us that it is only a “complication” which is really that we fear ourselves and the destruction of our ego. Hum… I don’t know how many people bought this then. Seems more like psudo-philosophy than anything else. And his example with the Egyptians might be partially right except 1) they were not the first artist 2) he neglects the whole religious aspect of their “art” which was really a way of story telling 3) early art also depicted animals and other things besides humans, how would he explain that?

I think he does, however, make some points about the general feeling of uncanny and he also identifies appropriate situations where one would sense it, but his analysis of why we feel that way is insane. Yes people feel threaten and so they are scared, but that’s very different from being scared and wanting to crawl back into the womb.

I want to see a conversation between Freud and Darwin.

His prose is excellent though. He makes good use of imagery, has varying sentence structure. His thoughts are clear yet ornately described.

Drovers

This was a fairly easy read considering the time period. There were simple sentence structures, making an overall periodic style. Although he tends to write in lists and complex sentence structures when he's describing people or scenes. For example, when we meet Robin: "Of the number who left Doune in the morning, and with the purpose we described, not a Glunamaie of them all cocked his bonet more briskly, or gatered his tartar hose under knee over a pair of more promising spiogs (legs) than did Robin Oig M'Combuch, called familiarly Robin Oig, that is, Young, or the lesser, Robin." There's about 6 commas in there and about three different thoughts. 1) of the people who left in Doune 2)nobody cocked their bonets more briskly or gatered their tartars like Robin 3)Robin's clan name and his position being the "lesser" or "young."


The dialogue was difficult to comprehend. There were tons of slang terms I didn't understand like "Sual of my pody[...]" and "The drove can pe gang two, three, four miles [...]."

First person narration came out of nowhere.

Douglas

Very cleanly conveyed thoughts, there were no multiple thoughts squeezed into run on sentences. The style was neither overtly flowery nor ignorant. It was a style similar to Hemingway, but slightly more detailed and a tad more advanced in his word usage. The frustrations of the author were successfully communicated, though he never came right out and said "I felt angry and frustrated." Neither one of those words were ever used. Instead he says,"[...] I was led to abhor and detest enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers [...]" Words like "detest" and "could regard" are far more controlled and calculating, giving off the feeling of irritation rather than rage.. It was an extremely disturbing read how he couldn't trust anyone and how he felt once he knew that slavery was unjust. His method of showing rather than telling, and all of his "I" uses are probably what made the piece so mentally accessible. His soul was in "unutterable anguish," this is the closest he could say to what he was feeling because there are no words strong enough for the repressing feeling of slavery. His patience and determination inspired me. It also made me grateful for my easily attained education, his story goes to show that ignorance is slavery.

Conrad

Good god this took such a long time for me to read even though it wasn't that long. His descriptions felt like that would never end. The writing just seemed cliche to me, which might be another reason why I had trouble getting through this.

"When I left him there to go back to my room the steward was finishing dusting. I sent for the mate and engaged him in some insignificant conversation. It was, as it were, trifling with the terrific character of his whiskers; but my object was to give him an opportunity for a good look at my cabin. And then I could at last shut, with a clear conscience, the door of my stateroom and get my double back into the recessed part. There was nothing else for it. e had to sit still on a small folding stool, half smothered by the heavy coats hanging there. We listened to the steward going into the bathroom out of the saloon, filling the water bottles there, scrubbing the bath, setting things to rights, whisk, bang, clatter -- out again into the saloon -- turn the key click. Such was my scheme for keeping my second self invisible. Nothing better could be contrived under the circumstances. And there we sat; I at my writing desk ready to appear busy with some papers, he behind me out of sight of the door. It would not have been prudent to talk in daytime; and I could not have stood the excitement of that queer sense of whispering to myself. Now and then, glancing over my shoulder, I saw him far back there, sitting rigidly on the low stool, his bare feet close together, his arms folded, his head hanging on his breast -- and perfectly still. Anybody would have taken him for me."

We have varying long and short sentences. A lot of dependent clauses and plenty of room to break up them up in order to make them more simple to read. He packs so much info into his sentence that it ends up running for multiple lines. He trys to make it sound like if it is a stream of consciousness as if he is simply remembering these events. But nobody actually talks or thinks like this.
There are some parallels between him and his double here. He felt that this man was him in a different body. Anybody would have mistaken him for the captain. They also had similar manners of behaving. I think the captain saw a lot of his younger self in this boy and thats why he wants to protect him.

"On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned for ever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach."

As far as word choice, we have an overall medium style of writing. He varies between simple language and more complex words, though I think he likes to use the more latin rooted words. Speaking of prolonged sentences, the example above is only the first sentence of the passage. It could have been broken up to at least five sentences.

Overall he did a go job at pointing you in a place. He's very good at giving visuals, even the process of reading his work is difficult. He succeeded in making a certain eerie mood that followed to the end as well. In other words, the tone and emotional state was consistent.

"The dark side of multiculturallism"

It was really hard for me to analyze this prose because the subject matter was so intense and eye-opening. First I read "The European Dilemma, it's starts of with a scene, which gave me the notion that this was going to be a bit on the sensational side. But then it just got more and more intense with mutilation of female genitalia and female abuse. This article largely appealed to personal experience where as the other argued with statistics. I was convinced of multiculturalism as being bad, which I guess of Ali's view. But I think the point of the article is to argue that it could be bad. Multiculturalism isn't bad, it's old taboos which interfere with freedoms we enjoy in Western society. And as a member of such a society I feel other should be granted the same freedom I have. I agree with Buruma's the notion that the answer is not forced atheism, there must be another way. People should have the right to religion. Just a generation ago woman were also repressed in western culture, and it had nothing to do with religion. But at the same time, the bible also doesn't point out to "write male superiority on the flesh of women." That statement thoroughly shocked me. "That language of wounds and bruises." I didn't like how Ali called Islam a backwards religion, I think almost all religion can be taken to extremes. But I couldn't help with agreeing with her view of injustice simply because of her personal experience. She said true Islam is irreconcilable with secular states." I think that's also perspective, I'm sure there is a way to view it as peaceful and I'm sure not all Isamist think that. What they are lacking is education, a different view of the world. If Western society ended the terror hold of the catholic church, I'm sure the future holds the same for Islam. The West used to have mass burnings of unbelievers just a few hundred years ago. And now look at the situation. These are just the patterns of human nature for whatever reason. We need to penetrate their media, so they can be like all the Europeans who want to be just like Americans (I'm kidding).


After reading the dilemma peace, Steyn's peace just crushed me. All the statistics. But at the same time his solution is either we need to start having a shit ton of babies or kill all the Islamic believers in order preserves Western thought. Although he never flats out and says it, this is his argument. It makes perfect sense except he fails to take into consideration the marvels of Western science and manipulation. While it's true that some countries which can't afford to feed themselves have babies, he still have more intelligence. We have robots and spy plans and all sorts of crazy gadgets. Look how we brought down the reds in Russia, and without military force. Of course he argure that they are fighting in similar ways, without weapons and with lots of semen. When and if Europe does become Eurasia, I think the Europeans won't go down without a fight. Spain has also made strict immigrations laws for Africans, I'm sure these other countries will have to suck up the idea of appearing racist and follow suit. He does have a good point about America and England, but for the most part the radicals are living in the stone age. And like I said, we have some crazzy crazy intelligence on out side. It won't be the same battle in my opinion.

Some stats I found:

1. 80% of the women in Oslo's shelter system are Muslims fleeing abusive families, husbands, and boyfriends;

2. Danish Muslims make up 5% of the population but 40% of the welfare rolls;

3. refugee—friendly Switzerland is already 20% Muslim;

4. the world's most wonderful city (in my view) Amsterdam is now majority Muslim;

5. 70% of all French prisoners are Muslim;

6. the four London bombers that killed 56 in July of 2005 received almost a million dollars in welfare benefits.

This whole situation kind of reminds me of the American civil war. I think what we need is enlightenment, all of us need to be aware. The middle east needs to learn tolerance and the west needs to think about what they are going to do about these statistics. In the future, there probably won't be race, we probably will be just a group of brown people like in that episode of south park where people from the future come to visit. That's alright, but if the future is going to be intolerant towards women and freedom, well that I have a harder time trying to swallow. I just don't see it happening, I can't see it happening. Please don't let it happen? I know I will dying fighting, and I'm a pacifist. But when I'm 80 years old and the government announces all women will have to have their clits chopped off, that's the day I blow up the white house or whatever power will be in that time. Besides, if westerns become the minority to that degree, they will become poor, and the poor always have more babies for whatever reason. We'll populate japan alright, trust me.

Speaking of which, another shocking part of Styln's piece is the whole story of that toy company making dolls for elderly people in Japan. That absolutely crushed me. Then he mentions it as part of are slippery slope towards transhumanism. Good god, all this stuff is crazy. Then it could get into this whole philosophical discussion of are we our bodies? Or are we our memories? What makes us human? Can we become computers so that we could live forever?


On the technical side of things, both dictions were quite different. Steyn used a lot of colons. A lot of if x then y. Y because x. It was mathematical. Homles read more like a novel style of prose, a lot of long sentences and clauses. But it was still very cleanly written and extremely easy to understand.

Paste

Good dialogue, terrible descriptions. Whenever he tried to set up a scene it took so damn long for him to say what he was getting at that it was hard to stay focused. It wasn't "aesthetically" pleasing either. The first sentence of descriptiontake up three lines.

"The pair of mourners, sufficiently stricken, were in the garden of the vicarage together, before luncheon, waiting to be summoned to that meal, and Arthur Prime had still in his face the intention, she was moved to call it rather than the expression, of feeling something or other.
Some such appearance was in itself of course natural within a week of his stepmother's death, within three of his father's; but what was most present to the girl, herself sensitive and shrewd, was that he seemed somehow to brood without sorrow, to suffer without what she in her own case would have called pain."

"Of feeling or some other" is so vague, and it doesn't say anything. "She would have called pain," come on! What does that even mean? Also, using words Latin words like "vicarage" makes it all the more a bore. There's simply too many pauses. His style is beyond suspense, it's downright torture.

But, as mentioned before his dialogue is a nice break of the distractingly tortuous parts where he narrates, I got the most out of the story when the characters spoke. But even they they did speak he would butt his fat pen in to add verbs or other info. This probably would have read better as a play. The overall story was alright I guess. The whole hinting that this old actress was a prostitute or had lovers I'm sure for the time was probably really entertaining. At the same time, I couldn't help but think the whole situation seemed a little too far fetched. And I'm not sure what he was getting at when Mrs. Guy would talk about the pearls as if they were alive.

Communist Crap

It was really funny to be reading this because both my parents were born in Cuba, so I kind of felt naughty for reading this. Anyway, I can see how it can be conniving. This establish a solid argument by giving examples of the past and how it was, and saying this is how it is, and this is how its going to be. The system itself is going to destroy itself because of it's nature. The second part where the answer to the problem is simply to end private property is where the whole thing falls apart for me. Obviously this is an issue that has more roots than private property. Class struggles have been going on forever, and it seems like there's nothing much we can do about it. I don't think handing over everything over to the government works because then they become the oppressors.


"Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat." --> this is using terror to get people to do something. It seems very new-ish and very "well if you don't do what we say, you're screwed."


"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation." --->Basically stating they have stripped us of all our values and now everything revolves around money. While this is true, I wouldn't say it's completely stripped us of values. This is a very "us versus them" way of thinking about it. While we are being "exploited", in a certain sense, their answer or solution involves just as much exploitation to people. What's missing is balance.

"It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers." This is true, but what were they before? Now anybody could be these things and before only those from wealthy families could evolve to become such professionals. It all seems very dramatic.

"The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation." Another good example of over-dramatization. If families are falling apart, I'm sure there much more to it than money.

"Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them." Making people think of themselves as slaves is a very powerful image, and I think that's why this document works. People do feel like slaves when they're working.


"These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market." Also bringing the attention to the fact that we are looked at as commodities is a powerful image.


The machine metaphor makes it sound scary.

HEMINGWAYz

This is the first Hemingway piece I actually enjoyed. I think it's because it was mostly his dialogue, which I'm sure everybody in the planet has already commented on. Also, I enjoy mystery. I'm pretty sure the piece was about abortion. My only issue with it is once again Hemingway has a weak female character. W/e, it was still entertaining.

"Low":
The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

"High":

Floating towards the other side of the station where fervid fields of grain swayed, and lush foliage sustained itself against the freely flowing banks of the Ebro, the youth the youth gazed upon countryside treasures. Colossal collections of land had formed a mountainous terrain. A cloud observed her from above, she in turn observed it's silhouette darkening the crops. She could see a river running amidst the huging branches of trees.

suspense

Being that the condition, state of being, and overall sense of the patient had slipped into a worse state, the father of the girl grew depressed. Varying back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness, the girl effected the mental state of all those close to her with every recovery and relapse she made. Her pale skin, the bag of urine hanging off her bed, the balding of her youthful scalp - were all too, caused too much emotion. And as she floated in the dream world, unknowing of her own agony and the agony of those around her, she grew restless in her subconscious. Dreams of escape and falling, helpless embodied and manifesting in her visions overtook her.

Balwin

This piece has many finely tuned observations and anecdotes. Balwin is a writer who clearly conveys his feelings, which are continuously on the surface.

The part were he writes about making black people an abstraction reminds me of Garcia Lorca's Poet in New York. In this book, his poem entitled "blacks" observes how amazing black culture was in America, but it simultaneously objectifies black people, viewing them almost as a thing or phenomena rather than individual people.

Anyway, I did find his writing style to be a bit tedious. His sentences were pretty much all long, and many had too many layers. It made the reading slow. He used to many semi-colons. He also tends to re use words within his sentences. For example, the ninth paragraph uses the word rage about 3 or 4 times.

Goodbye to all that

In my opinion Didion's piece is an enjoyable read. Easy to get through and well written. I relate to much of what she said, and I'm sure I'll feel like her when I get older if I stay in the city. I think she made good use of sentence variation, not everything was simple nor complex. To me it strikes a perfect middle. Also, good use of imagery and senses. I like the way she directly talks to the reader and her simple use of vocabulary. This read almost as if it were a letter from a friend. I also liked the way she broke up sentences with semi-colons. I enjoyed reading this far more than Robert Grave's lethargic account of Wold War 1. And I much appreciated her anecdotes.

Bell Jar

This was an interesting read, although I was semi-annoyed with all the metaphors. Especially because they were all formulated the same way. "Like a colossal junkyard..." "...like a bad picture" etc. I HATE IT when people use the word like too much.
But I did appreciate the how easy the text read. There were a lot of simple sentences. The mood of the text is depressing as hell, the character just felt indifferent and worthless and irritated.

Lawrence, the anti-Nabokov

He uses many short, simple sentences, as well as relatively simple vocabulary. He usually starts with the subject then moves on to the verb/adjective. We have lots of adjectives actually. But he doesn't tend to list them like other authors we've read. He also starts off with independent clauses in many of his sentences. I noticed a lot of pattern 12 to describe situations, and a decent use of prepositional phrases. He especially uses the word "but", which goes with the story line of this family looks perfectly normal on the outside but obviously they are not. There really wasn't much imagery nor description. After reading Nabokov his style seems plain, boring, and unimaginative. He does possess the clarity Orwell wrote about, but in my opinion this style doesn't work for Lawrence when it comes to fiction. Where is the imagery? Where are the metaphors? This is far too bland, it needs spice.

Orwell

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

All of this is the journalist in Orwell manifesting himself. Straight, simple, to the point, easy to read - this is all characteristically journalistic. I’m sure he hated both Joyce for his never-ending sentences and Nabokov for his overly intellectual language. Most of this piece is formatted in lists such as the above. Making list and using simple language makes it harder to argue with him because his ideas are so cleanly formatted. It’s almost as if a lawyer wrote this.

There are a lot of pattern 1 and pattern 2 and pattern 3 sentence structures. However, the following has a combination of pattern 3 combined with a 16a-ish pattern– “If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.” But mostly we find either pattern 2 or 3 and a ton of modifiers companied with metaphors.

Here we have an a complex sentence with multiple layers followed by Orwellian Metaphor – “But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Lastly, I will deconstruct the following:
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity [simple sentence]. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink [Dependent clauses followed with a modifiers and metaphor]. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics [simple sentence]." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia [16 and 4]. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer [7a]. I should expect to find--this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify--that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship [11a].”

Joyce

She was an active, practical woman of middle age.

Not long before she had celebrated her silver wedding and renewed her intimacy with her husband by waltzing with him to Mr. Power's accompaniment.

In her days of courtship, Mr. Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant figure: and she still hurried to the chapel door whenever a wedding was reported and, seeing the bridal pair, recalled with vivid pleasure how she had passed out of the Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount, leaning on the arm of a jovial well-fed man, who was dressed smartly in a frock-coat and lavender trousers and carried a silk hat gracefully balanced upon his other arm [Compound sentence with semicolon, no conjunction].

After three weeks she had found a wife's life irksome and, later on, when she was beginning to find it unbearable, she had become a mother[A series with variation].

The part of mother presented to her no insuperable difficulties and for twenty-five years she had kept house shrewdly for her husband [pattern9a].

Her two eldest sons were launched [simple].

One was in a draper's shop in Glasgow and the other was clerk to a tea- merchant in Belfast.

They were good sons, wrote regularly and sometimes sent home money [pattern 7a].

The other children were still at school [Simple sentence].

Poetic devices noted:
Alliteration - "Celebrated her silver" and "intimacy with her husband by waltzing"
Strange word choice - irksome
Repetition - "mother. The part of mother..."

Lolita

Sybil was my mother's older rigid sister, who I liked very much despite the fact that she was also in love with my father, and married to my father's cousin, and then served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Aunt Sybil wrote wrote self fufilling poetry about how she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, her pink-rimmed azure eyes would scan the writing as her waxen complexion glistend. Her husband would spent most of his time traveling, espically in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.

Bill Clinton

Clinton's speech makes many attempt at convincing his audience that he's simply one of us. For example, he starts with"My fellow citizens", then uses the words "we" and "us" repeatedly. Each word shows up sixty plus times throughout the speech.

He also uses running sentences in order to give off a kind of sincerity:

"And I thank the millions of men and women whose steadfastness and sacrifice triumphed over Depression, fascism and Communism.
Today, a generation raised in the shadows of the Cold War assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom but threatened still by ancient hatreds and new plagues." But there were also periodic sentences to convey the same ideas:

"Today, a generation raised in the shadows of the Cold War assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom but threatened still by ancient hatreds and new plagues."

Obviously, there was much mentioned about the American struggle in the past and how that effected the then present time.

Overall, I found his vocabulary simple yet elegant. Instead of using fancy words, he uses imagery and metaphors. "This ceremony is held in the depth of winter. But, by the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring." There were also a lot of simple sentences with poetic elements. His rhythm was strong and steady. "

My personal favorite quotes from the speech were: "Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world, and the urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy," and "Though we march to the music of our time, our mission is timeless."

I noticed there was a lot of mention of change, the word occurs eleven times to be exact. His mention of change went hand-in-hand with his emphasis on hope despite the evident struggles to be faced. This, of course, reminded me much of Obama.

A silver dish

"Then for the rest of the week Woody [use of alliteration] was busy, had jobs to run, office responsibilities, family responsibilities [repetition of words and ideas]. He lived alone; as did his wife; as did his mistress: everybody in a separate establishment. Since his wife, [use of subject first in the sentence] after fifteen years of separation, had not learned to take care of herself, Woody did her shopping on Fridays, filled her freezer [important details in front, less important details follow making the sentence peculiar]. He had to take her this week to buy shoes. Also, Friday night he always spent with Helen—Helen was his wife de facto [once again, subject comes before important idea]. Saturday he did his big weekly shopping. Saturday night he devoted to Mom and his sisters [repetition with the word Saturday]. So he was too busy to attend to his own feelings except, intermittently, to note to himself, “First Thursday in the grave.” “First Friday [alliteration], and fine weather.” “First Saturday; he’s got to be getting used to it.” Under his breath he occasionally said, “Oh, Pop.”

Overall I noticed that the author tends to arrange sentences like he rearranges his story. First comes the subject of the story, his father. Then comes all these details and repetitions. He sneaks important information out of nowhere. His transitions are sudden, which makes the reader feel like they're on a roller coaster. He tells the story in different bursts of perspective in regards to time. First we are with pop, then he is dead, then we are back with him, and so on.

???

I guess I'm suppose to post two examples of noun and verb styles of writing. So here it goes:

I think this has more nouns - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8233265.stm

The article starts as follows: "Abdullah Laghmani and at least 21 other people were killed in the attack on a mosque in the town of Mehtar Lam.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, told AP news agency a suicide bomber had targeted Mr Laghmani." and later continues in past tesnse with little to no verbs such as "Reports say a suicide bomber detonated his explosives in a crowd of officials - including Mr Laghmani - who had gathered outside the mosque in Mehtar Lam for a ceremony."

And this has more verbs -

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090902/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_tv_debates;_ylt=AuY2ugUHTCnMSKioUEVb2NN0bBAF;_ylu=X3oDMTJyOXJ0ZTI1BGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkwOTAyL2V1X2JyaXRhaW5fdHZfZGViYXRlcwRwb3MDNARzZWMDeW5fcGFnaW5hdGVfc3VtbWFyeV9saXN0BHNsawN0dmNoYW5uZWxwbGE-

The article starts with this: "Prime Minister Gordon Brown is weighing an invitation to debate with his two main rivals on live television — a first for Britain where leaders have resisted the sort of debates that can make or break election campaigns in countries like the U.S. and Australia."

Already we are drawn to action. Debates, resistance, etc.

Then there are passages which verbs are used to claim future happenings, take the following:

"Next year's election will likely see Britain change its government for the first time since 1997. For more than 12 months, opinion polls have predicted Brown's governing Labour Party will lose to the opposition Conservatives."