28-30 August 2017 - Practice Your Writing

30 August 2017

The InterGossip was out from yesterday until this morning, so another apology for another delay.

Although the storm will be headed away later this morning, waters will still rise because of drainage from upstream and from high elevations.

Think safety in all ways.

-      Mr. H

English 1301

Old Mr. Hall

Jasper Teaching Center

Angelina College

29 August 2017

I apologize for the delay in sending this; I’ve been off on a rescue mission (my part in it is boring).

Until we meet, practice keeping a journal of your adventures here where The Hundred-Acre Wood has grown floodier and floodier.  Use any sort of blank book or random sheets of paper stapled together.  This needn’t be all writing; you can attach receipts, notes, pictures you’ve printed out, a leaf blown from your favorite tree, and so on.  English 1301 is mostly dull, boring, what-am-doing-here mechanical, methodical, format writing for professional purposes, so have a little fun with this project.

Make entries whenever the thought occurs to you, and note the date, day, time, and temperature.  You can’t avoid the occasional first-person voice, but try to avoid the I, I, I, me, me, me self-obsession one sees on anti-social media, and write objectively about the weather and about others.  Avoid hyperbole (a flood is not biblical unless Noah and his Ark drop anchor outside your door). No awesome, epic, jaw-dropping, or other inflated adjectives.

Keep your narrative clear and use few adjectives and almost no adverbs (One cannot unactually do anything; thus, “actually” is mere filler).

Avoid these hurricane cliches’:

Rain event

We’re not out of the woods

Dodged the bullet

Storms that brew – what do they brew? Tea?  Coffee?

Storms that gain or lose steam, as if they were teakettles or steam locomotives

Hurricanes that pound

Hurricanes that lash

Reduced to rubble

Wreak havoc

Swirling in the Gulf / spinning in the Gulf – well, okay, but perhaps used too

 often?

Left a swath of destruction in its wake - what’s a swath, eh? 

Hurricanes that make landfall – well, what else would they make?  A gun rack

in shop class?

Hurricanes that slam ashore

Hurricanes that storm ashore – well of course they storm; they’re storms

Changed my life forever (Did it really? But your life is always changing.  Are you going to let a hurricane push you around?  You are made of sterner stuff.)

Mother Nature's wrath

Mother Nature’s fury

Mother Nature's anything

There is no Mother Nature

Decimated (unless precisely one out of every ten people was killed)
Trees snapping like matchsticks (do matchsticks ever snap like trees?)

Bodies stacked like cordwood (I’ve seen stacked wood; I’ve seen stacked bodies;

          ain’t the same)

Claimed the life (“Sorry, pal, no claim check, no life.”)

Mother of all hurricanes (Saddamn lives on)

Batten down the hatches (Darn, I forgot to buy a hatch; I wonder if the stores

 are still open)

Hunker down

Cars tossed about like Matchbox toys / Cars smashed like matchboxes

Boats bobbing like corks / boats smashed like matchboxes

Roofs peeled off

Rain coming down in sheets (never blankets?)

Calm before the storm

Calm after the storm, almost always “eerie”

Visual cliché’ – a camera shot of a palm tree and some idiot in a slicker telling

 us the obvious

ANY allusion to Katrina

Perfect storm

Storm of the century

A hurricane that defined a generation

Looked like a war zone – no, it didn’t.

Fish storm

Unleashed

Your children and grandchildren may read your flood journal someday – let us pray they will be bored by it.

See you next week.

Cheers,

Mr. H