I Appreciate Good Writing

I am currently reading Abraham Verghese's Cutting For Stone. Katie gave it to me for my birthday. It's taking me some time to get through because each sentence is heavy with brilliant literary devices, beyond vivid imagery and incredibly expressed ideas. I am relishing every line and trying to take it all in.

Here are some gems I've found, so you can get a small taste of what the entire book is like:

As the good abbess watched the two waving figures on the ship's rail recede to white dots, she felt a twinge of apprehension. Whaf if by their blind obedience to her grand scheme they were being condemned to a horrible fate? "The English missionaries have the almighty Empire behind them...but what of my girls?" She wrote that the seagull's shrill quarreling and the splatter of bird excreta had marred the grand send-off she had envisioned. She was distracted by the overpowering scent of rotten fish, and rotted wood, and by the bare-chested stevedores whose betel-nut-stained mouths drooled lechery at the sight of her brood of virgins.

She sat sideways looking out. She saw a gray dart below - the shadow cast by the plane on the ocean. A giant fish she imagined was swimming just below the surface of the sea, keeping pace with her. The water looked cool and inviting, unlike the interior of the plane, which had grown less steamy but was still thick with the mingled scents of the human freight. The Arabs had the dry, musty smell of a grain cellar; the Asians contributed the ginger and garlic; and from the whites came the odor of a milk-soaked bib.

Good writing, eh? (Yes, just because I went to Canada I think I can start talking like them.) I love authors that aren't afraid to push grammar principles to unexplored areas. I love the spice and flavor provided by varied sentence structure, appositives, and delayed adjectives. I love sentences rich with detailed descriptions. This spring, I took ENG 329, Teaching Grammar in High School, and it was surprisingly one of the most enjoyable classes of my BYU experience. I began to realize the value of grammar instruction in school. I learned ways to teach grammar to students in fun, interesting mini-lessons. I discovered that grammar, when mastered, has the potential to greatly enhance writing, not only in its correct usage, but also in the very breaking of its rules.

Now, any time I read anything, I read it more closely and delight more fully in the creative construction of mind-blowing writing-which, I won't ever forget, first and foremost comes from applying correct grammar principles.