On Writing Well Day 9

一 words and expressions

1. Adjectives you would squirm to use in conversation—“wondrous,” “dappled,” “roseate,” “fabled,” “scudding”—are common currency.

be common currency的意思是被广泛流传，接受

2. But nobody has done it more succinctly than Jonathan Raban, revisiting the Midwestern states inundated by the river’s recent massive floods.

be inundated (with / by sth)：to receive so much of something that you cannot easily deal with it all 收到太多（某物）而应接不暇

3. to gobble up these squirming little throwbacks.

gobble up有两个基本意思。文中的意思偏向第一个

1）吞并；击垮If an organization gobbles up a smaller organization, it takes control of it or destroys it.

2）消耗；耗费 To gobble up something such as money means to use or waste a lot of it.

4. but they convey an idea so fanciful that they take us by surprise.

fanciful：imagined rather than based on facts – often used to show disapproval想象的，空想的，幻想的〔常含贬义〕。这里是褒义的。

5. New sights touch off thoughts that otherwise wouldn’t have entered the writer’s mind.

touch off：引发;触发;引起 If something touches off a situation or series of events, it causes it to start happening.

二 thoughts

The dismal truth is that it’s very hard.

In chapter 13, the author tells us how to write nonfiction of places and travel. I seldom write about places, so these advice is very practical to me.

My advice can be reduced to two principles—one of style, the other of substance.

风格确实很重要。我读过很多的游记就像流水账一样单调无聊。好的游记必须体现行文者一定的风格，而不是上午我去了哪哪哪儿，下午去了哪哪哪儿。第二个是内容，这对于一个游记来说更为关键，在不同人的笔下，同一个景点呈现出的美会有很大差异。

But whatever place you write about, go there often enough to isolate the qualities that make it distinctive. Finally, however, what brings a place alive is human activity: people doing the things that give a locale its character.

确实，一个著名的景点之所以出名，全因为人及人的行为活动赋予了它意义。