Writing: Exercises in Style

RZ Ye
2 min readMar 15, 2023

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Style 1: Beneath the purple night sky, fire trucks and ambulances stood sentinel on opposite sides of the deserted road. All around, the buildings loomed dark and silent, bereft of life. The fire truck’s piercing headlights cast an eerie glow, while its flashing red and blue warning lights seared through the dim streetlights. No wounded, no criminals, not even a drop of rainwater to break the silence in this desolate land. An open canvas, waiting for its painter. The truth of what just occurred here remains hidden, even from the first responders themselves. This barren wasteland, surrounded by withered branches and decaying leaves, appears to be a snapshot of humanity, evaporated in an instant.

Style 2: Under the all-encompassing nocturnal firmament that consumes all, the carmine and ivory colossi undulate along the terrain, their environs cloaked in obscurity. Solely their orbs, blazing like minute sols, penetrate the umbrage. An immaculate expanse devoid of any indicia of vitality, except for the dead twigs and flora that lie strewn about. The constellations, scattered about in every direction, gaze upon their silhouettes, their tenuous azure irises concealed behind a shroud of obscurity. It’s uncertain whether humanity had vanished from the world aeons ago or whether they never existed to begin with. There’s nothing but the dark, solitary spirits enclosed within the steel colossi, ceaselessly dreaming. They emit a penetrating, dolorous sibilance that reverberates through the night, suffused with the aroma of demise and agony.

(I can’t even read this paragraph, there are so many words I don’t even know, I just wrote a paragraph with some mystery feeling and then replaced each word with the least common synonym I could find, then replace some of these words from Google Translate with French or Spanish lol. The original paragraph: Under the night sky that swallows everything, the red and white monsters crawl on the ground, their surroundings dim. Only their eyes shone with a bright light like the sun. A clean open space, without the slightest sign of life, only branches and leaves that have been dead for a long time. The stars in all directions peered at their backs, their dim blue eyes hidden in a black curtain. Humans may have disappeared from the world years ago, or perhaps they never actually appeared, all alone in the darkness of the steel monsters endlessly imagined. They let out a shrill hiss, the sound was harsh and unmistakable, full of sadness, with the smell of death and hurt.)

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