Strunk and White advise the writer to place himself in the background.
The goal is to draw the reader into the scene by using showing not telling language, while avoiding any narration that involves the author's mood or temper.
By placing yourself in the background, you negate the tendency to affect a style, and this allows your writing style to surface on its own.
Post an example of this from the book you are presently reading.
Post your own paragraph as an example of this Strunk and White suggestion.
The goal is to draw the reader into the scene by using showing not telling language, while avoiding any narration that involves the author's mood or temper.
By placing yourself in the background, you negate the tendency to affect a style, and this allows your writing style to surface on its own.
Post an example of this from the book you are presently reading.
Post your own paragraph as an example of this Strunk and White suggestion.
1 comment:
I suspect that suggestion of "placing yourself in the back ground" must apply more to third person narrative than to first person writing since when considering Jack Kerouac's On the Road you see opinion sandwiched within showing writing as in the following:
"because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!""
While the last paragraph of the book is an excellent use of what S&W's showing looks like (again with droplets of opinion mixed within) when Jack writes:
“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
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