13 Writing About Places: The Travel Article
As for style, strive for fresh words and images. Choose words that don't come easily. Those are probably cliches. But don't go too far, which can make you pompous.
As for the substance, make sure the details are significant - they do useful work.
不是很懂的句子：
1. It’s natural for all of us when we have gone to a certain place to feel that we are the first people who ever went there or thought such sensitive thoughts about it. Fair enough: it’s what keeps us going and validates our experience.
To validate is to prove that something is based on truth or fact, or is acceptable. It can also mean to make something, like a contract, legal.
You may need someone to validate your feelings, which means that you want to hear, “No, you’re not crazy. It’s acceptable to be angry about that.” Or you may need someone to validate your parking ticket — which means you have to prove that you bought something, so you can get parking for free. Whatever it is you are seeking to validate needs the added support or action from someone else to make it valid.
2. This is a world where old meets new—old never meets old. It’s a world where inanimate objects spring to life: storefronts smile, buildings boast, ruins beckon and the very chimneytops sing their immemorial song of welcome.
这一小段和这一段的style有什么关系？
摘抄：
1. As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self—the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells—and keep an objective eye on the reader.
2. One man’s romantic sunrise is another man’s hangover.
Nowhere else in nonfiction do writers use such syrupy words and groaning platitudes. Adjectives you would squirm to use in conversation—“wondrous,” “dappled,” “roseate,” “fabled,” “scudding”—are common currency.
syrupy: cloyingly sweet or sentimental
platitudes: If an executive gives a speech that begins, "This business is all about survival of the fittest. You need to burn the midnight oil and take one for the team," his employees might get sick of listening to these meaningless clichés and tell him to cut the platitudes.
The English language contains many old, worn-out clichés, or platitudes. Phrases like "ants in your pants" and "as American as apple pie" are so overused that they've almost lost their meaning. People rely on these tired old remarks when they can't think of anything original to say. Be warned: if you throw too many platitudes into your conversations, people are eventually going to get tired of listening to you.
squirm: to experience acute embarrassment, shame, anguish, remorse, or mental punishment
Half the sights seen in a day’s sightseeing are quaint, especially windmills and covered bridges; they are certified for quaintness.
quaint:Quaint means strange and unusual in an old-fashioned and charming way. It's a word you'd use to describe a little store that sells tea cozies and antique tea services, or your grandmother's habit of calling the radio the "wireless."
There is a commonly used sarcastic sense of quaint––when something is run down or shabby and you're trying to say something positive, you might substitute "How...quaint" for "How...interesting." In Middle English, this adjective meant clever or cunning. Its origin is Old French queinte, cointe, from Latin cognitus "known," from cognōscere "to learn."
Leave “myriad” and their ilk to the poets. Leave “ilk” to anyone who will take it away.
ilk: Ilk is a certain type of person, usually a type you don't care for. The word is used in sentences like "I'm tired of you and your ilk!
When you say "you and your ilk," you mean "you and everyone just like you." And that's not usually meant in a nice way. You probably wouldn't talk about Nelson Mandela and his ilk — ilk sounds negative. Usually, you're talking about a criminal and his ilk, or a crooked politician and his ilk. If someone is talking about your ilk, it might be time to get new friends or change your ways.
In only two paragraphs we have a feeling not only for the tackiness of the New California landscape, with its stucco tepees and instant housing and borrowed Hawaiian romance, but for the pathetic impermanence of the lives and pretensions of the people who have alighted there.