So he listens. Sitting with elbows propped and hands clenched, and with the sunglasses and cap protecting eyes damaged by glaucoma, he listens as students read their drafts and fret over narrative.
“People read with their ears, whether they know it or not,” Mr. Zinsser says.
— Dan Barry, NYT, “A Writing Coach Becomes a Listener”
Bruce Springsteen may have saved my soul, but William Zinsser saved my prose.
Now, this is my America: A diverse bunch of people lined up at a mic to give their congressman a piece of their mind on immigration reform. While we’re at it, here’s the Congressman:
More: Pascrell pushes path to citizenship for those in the U.S. illegally
These people became citizens today. Welcome them aboard the Great American Clusterfuck.
So the birders park in a cul-de-sac out of the way of the trucks that rumble in and out of the factories and warehouses. They climb down a hill strewn with trash and set up tripods on a mound of crumbled brick and debris. They point binoculars, cameras or telescopes at the McMansion of a nest built to accommodate the eagles and their young. Then they wait.
When the eagles are nesting, one parent will head off in search of food while the other keeps vigil atop the eggs, hidden from view in the recesses of the nest. You could sit there for hours waiting for that shock of white to bob over the top. This reporter, endowed with less patience than even a novice birdwatcher, made a separate solo trip out to the creek in late March, when the winter chill still stuck to the wind. I froze my butt off, telephoto lens fixed on the nest, and the damn eagles never showed.
Today, I told the true story of two American bald eagles who built their nest on a toxic waste site that’s being turned into a major real estate development. Only in New Jersey!
- American bald eagles (and other various birds of prey)
- Baby aligators
- Butterflies
- Chickens (mostly the ones belonging to my girlfriend’s parents)
- Crawfish
- Elephants
- Hercules the Unicorn Cow
- Pigs
- Puppies (both the pilfered kind and the professional athlete kind)
- Quail
- Quaker parrots
- Military dogs
- Reptiles of various species
- Seals
- Sheep (and the men who sheer them)
- Sharks
- Show dogs of various breeds
- Spotted salamanders
- Tapirs
- Tigers (and the men who love them)
AP Style tip: Scotch whisky is distilled in Scotland from malted barley; bourbon is American whiskey distilled from corn grain.
— AP Stylebook (@APStylebook) April 30, 2013
About the author.
S.P. Sullivan is a writer, reporter and multimedia journalist based in Northern New Jersey. Read more »
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