Tài liệu Essential guide to writing part 24 pptx

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The final sentence sums up the scene and states the impression

directly, as to the modifiers "neatly," "clean," "gay," but on

the whole the images create the sense of middle-class fulfill￾ment. Any ugliness is excluded. If the lawn were disfigured

by crabgrass, if weeds leered among the flowers, the facts are

discreetly omitted.

Very different are the details—and the impression—in this

account of the homes of miners in the north of England:

I found great variation in the houses I visited. Some were as decent

as one could possibly expect in the circumstances, some were so

appalling that I have no hope of describing them adequately. To

begin with, the smell, the dominant and essential thing, is inde￾scribable. But the squalor and the confusion! A tub full of filthy

water here, a basin full of unwashed crocks there, more crocks

piled in any odd corner, torn newspaper littered everywhere, and

in the middle always the same dreadful table covered with sticky

oilcloth and crowded with cooking pots and irons and half-darned

stockings and pieces of stale bread and bits of cheese wrapped

round with greasy newspaper! And the congestion in a tiny room

where getting from one side to the other is a complicated voyage

between pieces of furniture, with a line of damp washing getting

you in the face every time you move and the children as thick

underfoot as toadstools! George Orwell

Sometimes a writer concentrates on one or two images

which symbolize the impression. In the following passage Al￾fred Kazin projects into two key symbols his childhood de￾spair at being forced to attend a special school because of his

stuttering:

It troubled me that I could speak in the fullness of my own voice

only when I was alone on the streets, walking about. There was

something unnatural about it; unbearably isolated. I was not like

the others! At midday, every freshly shocking Monday noon, they

sent me away to a speech clinic in a school in East New York,

where I sat in a circle of lispers and cleft palates and foreign accents

holding a mirror before my lips and rolling difficult sounds over

and over. To be sent there in the full light of the opening week,

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