Impro/fessional writing

22 Sept 2010
Incredible! How much joy and enthusiasm an early Autumn afternoon can bring. The wine-red leaves of trees prepairing for a long sleep and the red scarves of women walking in the park. These pictures grabbed me and held me tight while I was sitting on a bench in one of the liveliest parks of Pécs. I was enjoying the smell of the Autumn breeze, the laughter of children, the lovers' first kiss and the sweet but ambivalent touch of the wind of change. All of a sudden, harsh yelling broke this harmony. A dog was rushing through the place, surely to his destruction, because he left a man seriusly injured behind.
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I was sitting on a bench in one of the the parks of Pécs. It was a lovely Autumn afternoon, and quite comforting, I can tell. Bunches of people surrounded me, talking, kissing and laughing. But I felt strange. Suddenly, a dog rushed through the park leaving yelling people and a man seriously injured behind.

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I am constantly getting acqainted with two books on writing. The first is William Zinsser's On Writing Well, the second one is Bruce Garrison's Professional Feature Writing. What I've found interesting and thought-provoking while reading them was that there were a lot more things to be cautious with about writing than I had ever thought. A colon, a period, a that or a which can easily be factors of failure.
I wrote these two paragraphs above in order to reflect my own understanding of the two viewpoints. The first one was intended to represent some kind of feature writing according to Garrison's ideas, while the second one introduces writing nonfiction. To be honest, I'm for the second type of writing. I find it honest and frank. The thoughts I rank the highest about the differences between nonfiction and feature writing I would like to quote from the book of Zinsser's: "The assumption is that fact and color are two separate ingredients. They're not; color is organic to the fact. Your job is to present the colorful fact".

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