ISSUE 16 MARCH 2022

StyleReview
The latest style analyses, imitations, and remixes

In This Issue Special Spotlight on

Animals As Metaphors André Aciman's
Alibis: Essays On
1. An Analysis on Brian Doyle's
"Joyas Volardores"
2. Imitations of Openings:
Doyle's first paragraph
Elswhere
Interpretations of Lavender Welcome to StyleReview! If you are new here, this
1. An Analysis on André Aciman's is your monthly dose of style analyses, imitations
"Lavender."
2. Imitation Using Symbols: from our editors that focus on specific style
Lavender as Shampoo devices, and for the first time ever, a remix! As
3. BONUS: Remix:
experimentation from our always, we encouraged our writers to follow the
writer! original
writing as strictly as possible for the
imitations; however, they expressed their desire to
Iconic Writing Using Water turn the imitations into something resembling
1. An Analysis on André
more of their own writing style, and we listened!
Aciman's “The Sea and
Remembrance.” Remixes will feature their imitated paragraph
2. Imitating Iconic Writing transformed into something that they feel is closer
to their own writing style. Also, new this edition is
our writers' reflections which will detail their
StyleReview, Inc. writing processes, insights, and more! In this
p. 384-9444-932 edition of StyleReview, we will be looking at Brian
e. [email protected] Doyle's "Joyas Volardores" and some of André
w. stylereview.com Aciman's passages from Alibis: Essays On Elsewhere.
We will be doing a close dive into metaphorical
and iconic writing, juxtaposition, and more (all
devices we have never covered before)!

01 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 Animals As
Metaphors
“Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous
immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car
hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner,
leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more
mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts
are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for
food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death;
they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living
creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the
engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend
in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred
years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years
old."

"The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven
tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk
around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big
as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred
feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It
is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama
every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years
old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from
human ken, for next to nothing is known of the the mating habits, travel patterns,
diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories,
despairs and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in
the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived
we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in
the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their
piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles."

Brian Doyle's essay "Joyas Volardores" was first published in The Scholar and later
published as the lead piece in his collection of essays titled One Long River of Sound:
Notes on Wonder, which Amazon describes as a "playful and moving bestselling book
of essays [that] invites us into the miraculous and transcendent moments of everyday
life." While reading the essay, it is impossible to ignore the rich imagery and
descriptive language; but in particular, Doyle's use of metaphor allows the audience
to understand the fleeting nature of love and life. Using different animals as
analogies for humans, a comparison that is heightened through his use of
parallelism, allows Doyle to emphasize juxtaposition, showing how people live their

02 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 lives differently through the different ways animals live their lives. Nonetheless,
indicating that regardless of how the individual chooses to live their life, there is an
overarching message that each moment has significance and love is inevitably
inevitable.

While it is clear that Doyle makes a deliberate connection between each animal he
mentions and humans, his connections vary in straightforwardness. As the piece
progresses, the comparisons also become more explicit. The hummingbird is
connected indirectly and somewhat loosely; it is almost as if this comparison can
only hold strong after reading about the whale and turtle. When describing the
hummingbird, Doyle indicates that they have "race-car hearts that eat oxygen," and
the consequence of this fast-paced life is that their life span is short. This is not a
deliberate statement that connects hummingbirds with humans; however, after
reading about the turtle and whale, the reader is forced to consider the
hummingbird as a metaphor for people because every other animal in this piece is
set up to be a metaphor; thus, the hummingbird becomes a metaphor for people
who live their lives in a fast-paced, potentially dangerous manner. In this section,
Doyle also creates a metaphor within a metaphor. He creates an extended
metaphor using a car as the hummingbird, or rather, the hummingbird's heart,
primarily when he writes, "To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts
that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate." The decision to use "race-car hearts"
reflects how fast a hummingbird's life goes by and how quickly they live it since a
race car is associated with speed. The decision to later continue the use of the car as
a metaphor for the hummingbird—which is a metaphor for humans— is impactful
when Doyle chooses to switch to the second person in "You fry the machine. You
melt the engine" when referencing the effect of a fast-paced life.

By switching to second person, Doyle emphasizes that the hummingbird's life is

really a metaphor for people because his audience is people, not hummingbirds, in
this essay. The decision to show the heart as a car engine is effective because most
people are familiar with cars and know that the more people drive them, especially
in a somewhat fast manner, the more likely that the engine will have issues, or the
car will eventually reach a point where it is no longer worth the fix. By taking a
universally known idea and image such as the engine breaking down and using
second person, Doyle directly addresses the audience through a comparison to the
hummingbird.

03 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 Still, this comparison is made without judgment, almost in a way showcasing
different lives people can live.

While this could have been a chance for Doyle to push against a fast-paced
lifestyle, he reveals that each creature has "approximately two billion heartbeats"
and that "you can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred
years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years
old." This allows the slow-paced and fast-paced life to be on equal pedestals,
accentuated by the parallel syntax, which allows the second section of the sentence
about the hummingbird to directly reflect the section about the tortoise, forcing
them to be regarded as the same. In addition, by utilizing second person in that
sentence and acknowledging the audience to consider their life by using "you,"
Doyle allows for the interpretation that people can live their lives fast or slow, and
it doesn't matter exactly how they live, but rather, what they take out of each
moment. The decision to say that regardless of how life is lived, every creature has
an equal amount of heartbeats also reflect that idea.

Interestingly, it feels as if Doyle's connections between the animal he mentions

and humans become more explicit as the piece progresses and he moves on to
different animals. Some are impossible to miss, like his most explicit connection to
humans with the whale. Although the whale is mentioned after comparing the fast
and slow lives of the hummingbird and turtle,
respectfully, it is impossible to ignore the
connection between whales and humans when
Doyle explores their lives in regards to
traditionally "human" experiences, such as
puberty, drinking milk, despair, spirituality,
wars when he writes "It drinks a hundred
gallons of milk from its mama every day… for
next to nothing is known of the the mating
habits, travel patterns, diet, social life,
language, social structure, diseases, spirituality,
wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue
whale." Arguably, most people would not think
of spirituality and war and immediately think
of a whale.

04 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 This, in turn, catalyzes the culmination of the critical point he makes by
comparing whales and humans when he says that "the animals with the largest
hearts in the world generally travel in pairs." When thinking of mating among
humans, traditionally, people think of pairs. His choosing to preface the essential
statement about pairs with some traditionally human-associated ideas such as
despair allows the metaphor to feel more blatant. This also allows his final
paragraph to resonate more with the reader. He makes the argument that "we are
utterly open with no one in the end," and the idea that there is one person for
everyone is a naive, childish idea. So even if humans are like whales, in the end,
traveling in pairs, they always are missing something, and throughout their lives,
like whales, they emit "penetrating moaning cries." However, as Doyle argues in his
final sentences, something will penetrate their hearts, forcing them to reconsider
impenetrable walls around their hearts, indicating that love, or rather the feeling of
it, is inevitable regardless of the way one chooses to live their life.

Reflection from the Writer

I had a lot of trouble with this analysis. Organizationally, an editor at StyleReview
expressed the desire to see this analysis go from most explicit comparison: the
whale to least explicit: the hummingbird, but I couldn't quite make all the pieces
work, specifically the concluding statement. While I feel like style analyses allow
you to become focused on a specific style device which can be helpful if you are
trying to learn how to write using that device successfully, sometimes I am left
even more confused on how to imitate a particular device after writing the analysis
because it is always more complex than it seems. Unlike the other writers featured
in this edition, on the next page, you can see that I decided to imitate Doyle's first
paragraph instead of his use of metaphor because I found that the differing levels
of explicitness in regards to metaphor were too challenging to emulate in a short
paragraph. In the imitation, I decided to focus more on imitating his structure of
short sentences followed by a very long one, which was difficult. It's always hard to
replicate a writer who is different from your writing style because it feels
unnatural. I also decided to skip the remix because I was having so much difficulty
with the imitation that I decided to leave it be.

05 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 Imitation of Openings
"Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats
ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A
hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels,
the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had
never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the
Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of
them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times
removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if
we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests."

Consider an orange for a second. Oranges come in 400

varieties. An orange can be sweet or with a slight
bitterness. The taste of an orange is much of what makes
up the orange, besides its orangeness. Navel Orange, the
bitter orange, looks like a perfect circular belly, and when
someone flips it over, a circular incision appears that
resembles the belly button of a pregnant woman;
Mandarin, the sweet orange, unless it is out of season, but
kids with sticky hands grab and unravel it regardless,
trying to get all of the skin off in one go; Seville orange,
the marmalade orange, has a bitter taste, and people use
every last drop on their toast, small pieces of orange
making the surface of the bread lumpy; orange, orange,
orange: sweet, small, bitter, big.

06 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 Interpretations
of Lavender
"My father’s old cologne can be found the world over. I have only to walk into a
large department store and there it is. Half a century later it looks exactly the same.
I could, if I were prescient enough and did not want to risk walking into a store one
day and not finding it, purchase a tiny bottle and keep it somewhere, as a stand-in
for my father, for my love of lavender, or for that fall evening when, as an
adolescent, I’d gone with my mother to buy my first aftershave but couldn’t make
up my mind and returned alone the next evening after school, happy to discover,
among so many other things, that a man could use shaving as an excuse for
wearing perfume."

André Aciman's collection of essays, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, opens with

"Lavender," which Cole from The New York Times describes as being complied of
"memories of childhood, youth, marriage and fatherhood [that] are skillfully
narrated in counterpoint with a dizzying tour of the varieties of lavender. The essay
becomes a story about Aciman's discovery of different lavenders, lavenders
associated with people, places and half-forgotten encounters." His diary-like writing
invites the reader into an intimate experience that makes Aciman feel close and
undeniably human, facilitating an equal relationship with the reader. While Aciman
meanders through the scent of lavender by mentioning various people in his
journey, it feels as if his father's lavender keeps coming back, and even though his
journey goes through alternative lenses and to other people, it is this scent that
remains. Perhaps indicating it is the most visceral— the unforgettable one— and if
this scent is a stand-in, a metaphor for his father, then perhaps his fixation on it
reveals the love he has for his father while unveiling, but not elaborating on
masculinity in regards to scents.

In the first sentence of the essay, Aciman writes, "life begins somewhere with the
scent of lavender," and near the end of the first page, he writes, "smell lavender and I
was sheltered, happy beloved." But it's not really about lavender; rather, it is about his
father. He has come to associate the scent with his father, so much so that his life and
lavender are now seen as an extension of his father. So much so, that lavender has
become a metaphor for his father.

07 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 Instead of directly addressing his love for his father, he chooses to use an explicit
metaphor. This vivid metaphor of lavender as a symbol for his father allows
Aciman to continually reiterate the idea that his father's impact will never leave
him because lavender, in some form, will always be around. The idea that his
father will always be around because lavender is his father is emphasized and
strengthened by this comparison because everyone knows lavender is always
available in some form; thus, his father is everywhere.

This idea prompts the idea of an inability to detach himself from lavender, which,
essentially, is an inability to detach himself from his father. When referencing his
father's cologne, still in the introductory pages of the essay, he writes, "I could, if I
were prescient enough and did not want to risk walking into a store one day and
not finding it, purchase a tiny bottle and keep it somewhere, as a stand-in for my
father, for my love of lavender." Aciman makes it clear that this scent of lavender is
a symbol for his father — "a stand-in," — and, so his journey of finding the perfect
lavender scent (that was not his father's) perhaps reflects his knowledge of the
inability to become his father as he is writing this essay as a father of his own
children. If lavender is a metaphor for his father, which he makes known by
comparing his cologne as "a stand-in" for his father, then it is no surprise that he
writes about his "love of lavender." By deliberately introducing an extended
metaphor of lavender to represent his father, Aciman's interpretations and journey
through the scent continually tie himself back to him, showing that his father's
influence follows and impacts his every move.

Although his father's influence is there, he doesn't actually end up buying his
father's cologne during this shopping experience, even when his "father's old
cologne can be found the world over... [he] only [has] to walk into a large
department store and there it is. Half a century later it looks exactly the same."
Why? Why, if lavender is a symbol for his father, for the love he has for him, why
not buy the exact same cologne? Again, Aciman seems to recognize that there is an
inability to become his father. His father influences him to have his own
exploration of the scent. In this exploration, there is a rejection of traditional
gender expectations. Often, people present their fathers as men who they have
never seen cry with heavy, "masculine" cologne. Lavender is seen as a traditionally
feminine scent.

08 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 When Aciman writes, "I'd gone with my mother to buy my first aftershave but
couldn't make up my mind and returned alone the next evening after school,
happy to discover, among so many other things, that a man could use shaving as
an excuse for wearing perfume," lavender becomes much more than a symbol for
his father. Now, through this sentence, lavender becomes "an excuse for wearing
perfume." Lavender becomes a metaphor for rejection of traditional ideas of
masculinity, a rejection fueled by his father's use of lavender cologne. And so,
lavender is now an all-encompassing symbol for his father, his father's love, and
his father's influence around aspects of perceived masculinity.

Imitation Using Symbols:

Lavender as Shampoo

My grandmother's cheap daffodil-colored

olive-scented shampoo sits in the dusty
corner of a small market. To see it, I only
have to walk past the pasta section, and
then always a bright yellow clearance
sticker on it greets me. If I wanted, if I
were bold enough and didn't care about
the lingering, overly intrusive eyes
following me, buy multiple bottles and
shove them in my suitcase as a substitute
for my grandmother's scent, for my
grandmother, or for her country in
summer, when, as soon as I'd dismount
the plane the scent of sweet cigarette
smoke and the lingering stickiness of
olive scented bar soap made for tourists,
would waft up to my nose, aromas
diffusing through the air by the heat,
alerting me that I was home.

09 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 Remix

In the market that sits on a deserted corner, my grandmother's

cheap daffodil-colored olive-scented shampoo sits on a rusted white
shelf in the corner. To find it, I walk through the fields, and past my
cousin's house, and across the street, and down the pasta aisle, and
there in the clearance section, I always find the head-sized bottle.
Sometimes, I get the urge to buy ten big bottles and crowd my small
suitcase as a reminder of her scent: my grandmother: her country. If
I was willing to give up space in my suitcase, which I wasn't, or I
wasn't closely followed by the obtrusive stares of the cashier who I
have known since I was six and coming to buy chocolate milk,
maybe I would have reached to the back of the shelf and snatched
all the bottles. Instead, I buy one precious 2 euro bottle to store in
the secret pocket of my suitcase, so my mom won't find it; later,
when I am home, I'll think of my other home, and my
grandmother, and the scent of sweet cigarette smoke, and the
lingering stickiness of olive scented bar soap made for tourists.

I found remixing my imitation difficult, and I do not feel like I truly remixed it. Instead
of this remix resembling my own writing (which was the purpose of adding a remix
section in StyleReview) with Aciman's influence only in using a symbol for a person, I
found that even my sentences still imitate his. Although I tried not to look at my
imitation, I did because I like his writing so much, and I definitely think this was a
mistake. I feel like my remix is more of a slightly looser imitation. I find that when
imitating another person's writing, I always try to create as strict an imitation as possible.
Here the passage pre-remix has a rhetorical situation of an imitation. The goal was to
create a duplication featuring different words and different people. I find that imitations
are somewhat helpful frauds because, while I can learn from other people's choices, I
would probably never make some of my choices if I had not had to imitate them;
however, sometimes, I feel like I might imitate too closely. I wanted to explore how an
imitation could become a loose copy and a more authentic piece of writing; however, I
failed in regards to creating a loose copy. I enjoyed this remix because I could focus on
including style devices like polysyndeton, which I normally would not have done had I
not been working with an already created piece. I also enjoyed not being constrained by
certain stylistic choices because I did not have to think as hard. That being said, I can
definitely still see some elements of my original imitation, regardless of changing the
rhetorical situation (as it is no longer an imitation), so I do not think this remix is
actually a remix; instead, it is just an attempted one (which is totally okay too)!

10 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 Reflection from the Writer

I found this style analysis and imitation a lot easier than the
first one. Although both focused on metaphors, I think that
Doyle's use of metaphors that changed in explicitness and
nature in every paragraph made it very difficult to imitate.
I think using one symbol to represent different yet
connected things is very interesting, but difficult to imitate,
especially in a short paragraph. While I did not explore this
idea in my imitation, I find it interesting and hope to
explore it in later editions. For me, incorporating the
shampoo bottle as a symbol for my grandma was not too
difficult. I copied his sentence length and structure, which
helped me make this explicit metaphor easy to write. In
both the passage and my imitation, a beauty product is a
symbol for a person. This differs from my traditional use
of metaphor because I do not normally make the metaphor
as explicit (given the use of "stand-in" or "symbol") as it is in
both of our passages. I can see myself using explicit
metaphors when I am trying to compare something to a
person in the future because I really like his use of this. I
feel like my remix was a complete fail because I still
imitated a lot of what Aciman did; thus, I do not feel like
the remix was really altered by imitation.

11 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 Iconic Writing
Using Water
""Those days are long gone. We may come to Venice and the Lido chasing sepia
memories from bygone days, but we will never find the same setting, the same
habits, the same patter of waiters’ deferential footsteps. Yet we are reluctant to
replace our daguerreotype vision of Visconti’s stylishly choreographed breakfast
scene at the Hôtel des Bains with the dressed-down, barefoot, come-as-you-are,
all-you-can-eat mêlée of parents and children that it is today. In the back of our
minds, we still hope that the miracle will occur: sitting alone on the veranda
facing the sea one evening, we’ll somehow find ourselves drifting into the stately
grandeur of a fin de siècle world—a world unaware that it is hurtling toward the
conflict that will end it. Thomas Mann’s novella was published in 1912. The guns
of August came two summers later.”

Situated more than halfway through Andre Aciman's Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere,
his chapter "The Sea and Remembrance" details his travels through Venice. His
writing mimics the winding and introspective nature of earlier chapters which
detail his vivid travels and introspective discussions on life, love, and culture.
Interestingly, Aciman's arguably unnecessary use of anaphora and juxtapositional
sentence lengths create a rhythmically pleasing and an iconic paragraph that
resembles the winding nature of water while highlighting the nostalgia that
traveling often brings.

It seems that Aciman can not write a medium-length sentence, as his sentences are
either short or extremely long. For example, his introductory sentence, "Those
days are long gone," is just five words and while that sets the scene perfectly in the
sense that the author knows this paragraph will feature a bittersweet nostalgic tone
focused on reminiscing, the following sentence "We may come to Venice and the
Lido chasing sepia memories from bygone days, but we will never find the same
setting, the same habits, the same patter of waiters' deferential footsteps" is more
than five times the length of the previous sentence. Interestingly, in this paragraph,
he chooses to situate all the longer sentences in the middle and sandwich them
between short sentences. For example, the last two sentences when he writes,
"Thomas Mann's novella was published in 1912. The guns of August came two
summers later." could easily be combined with a simple conjunction, yet he
chooses not to do so.

12 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 This sandwiching effect created through his use of juxtapositional sentence
lengths creates a feeling of a gondola on water. In the beginning, as they first start
to drift in the water, they probably resemble people as soon as they get on the ice
to ice skate, a little bit rusty. After the initial period of slowness, during which the
people get on, they go faster through the water, until they finally come to a stop.
This is incredibly effective because this whole chapter features reminiscing on
travels and a journey through Venice. Venice is known for it's gondola rides and
water, so it makes sense that he chooses to make his writing reflect the water
because that heightens the rich imagery that he uses throughout the passage as the
reader can imagine meandering through the water as he describes Venice.
Different sentence lengths also reflect nostalgia and remembering memories:
sometimes they come in short snippets, other times they come in long rivers of
words. His use of juxtapositional sentence lengths creates an iconic piece, which
according to Geoffrey Leech and Micheal Short, is when "textual forms imitate
reflect, encode, or dramatize meanings they express (qtd. in Holcomb and
Killingsworth 23).

Even his use of anaphora feels deliberate.

In the second sentence, he writes, "We may
come to Venice and the Lido chasing sepia
memories from bygone days, but we will
never find the same setting, the same
habits, the same patter of waiters'
deferential footsteps." The repetition of
"the same" is not actively necessary to
understand the sentence's meaning. He
could have written, "We may come to
Venice and the Lido chasing sepia
memories from bygone days, but we will
never find the same setting, habits, and
patter of waiters' deferential footsteps."
Notice how when we remove the repetition
of "the same'' rhythmically, it is not as
complex and sonically pleasing as it was
originally written.

13 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 This repetition of "the same'' feels like water crashing onto a wall. The sound of
the crash is created through the repetition of "the same," which only highlights the
iconic nature of the piece in the sense that it reflects the subject matter, which is
created through the juxtapositional sentence lengths. Even his use of "come-as-
you-are, all-you-can-eat," creates this similar rhythm. Both phrases, connected
through hyphens, feature four syllables. The rhythmically conscious nature of his
piece feels like a deliberate desire to resemble water which is appropriate given he
is writing about Venice, given the iconic Venitian Canal. His iconic writing allows
the reader to feel as if they are traveling on the water, reminiscing on old
memories, hearing the pounding of water on concrete from a distance.

Imitating Iconic Writing

The arrival days always drifted by on red, bleary-eyed plane trips. We
would come to Larnaca to visit my grandmother and the sea, perpetually
running from the ever-fleeting nature of summer, and everything would
be the same as I left it: the same faded apron decorated with chicken
from Prague, the same three magnets on the fridge: Hawaii, Strasburg,
Cyprus, the same melody of the ice cream truck. Yet, we were all a little
different, forced to, begrudgingly, rearrange our pieces to comfortably
fit into a bigger mosaic, replace our faded flip-flops from the year before
and repurpose our dresses that no longer zipped up. Never far away, a
forgotten, dusty memory would drift into our minds: perfectly peeled
oranges on a previously
undiscovered beach, the juices sticking to our
salty-sweat-stained skin.

14 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 Final Reflection
I found this style analysis and imitation my favorite
one out of the three. I haven't ever really thought
about iconic writing before, and the amount of
effort it takes to create an iconic piece is a lot, which
I found out through my failed imitation. It is also
kind of sad how most people probably do not
notice iconic writing. This PSA is for our
subscribers to start looking at iconic writing and
appreciating it! I also tried to make my writing
reflect water in my imitation like he did, but
because I struggled to imitate the final two short
sentences, I think it lost the complete feeling of
water; however, I do think that some of the longer
sentences filled with commas, if you look, can
reflect waves given that I am talking about the sea at
one point. I think the main difficulty of style
analyses is that you never quite know if you are
reaching too far. Everyone has heard the memes
about English teachers saying, "the curtain is blue
because it reflects the character's sadness."
Sometimes I feel like I am reaching too far. Also, I
meant to do a remix on this imitation, but again,
my remix was a fail, so decided not to include it. It
is hard to remix an imitation because you often
imitate writers you admire, so you do not really
want to change your work to drift farther away
from them. I hope to expand on remixing
imitations in the future because I feel like you can
learn a lot from imitations by learning new style
devices, but I would like to write authentically. I feel
like authenticity is often lost in imitations.

15 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 Thank You for Reading

This edition of StyleReview was a labour of love. While we

are very proud of our style analyses, as we felt they went
in-depth enough on specific style devices like iconic and
metaphorical writing, many of us found imitations difficult
because they felt inauthentic. In the future, we might
encourage writers to imitate more loosely, which will
hopefully allow us to remix the imitations more easily. As
always, we appreciate all of our subscribers and hope you
are looking forward to the 17th edition of StyleReview,
which will be out in April. Don't forget to use code MGM
for 25% off our yearly subscription!

16 STYLEREVIEW | ISSUE 16
 Works Cited

Aciman, André. “Lavender .” Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, Picador, New York, 2012.

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Cole, Teju. “Essays from One of Our Best Wishful Thinkers.” The New York Times. The New
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Doyle, Brian, and David James Duncan. “One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder.” Amazon,
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Doyle, Brian. “Joyas Voladoras.” The American Scholar, 2 Dec. 2019,
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Holcomb, Chris, and M. Jimmie Killingsworth. Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of
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