Followers of this blog, and I mean both of you, know by now that I am a fan of getting the word out about good writing. Here’s a nice example from the May issue of the Atlantic Monthly. It is from the cover article, titled “We Will Never Run Out Of Oil.” The whole article is fascinating, and I suggest you check it out. But there are also some nice little gems. Consider these two sentences:
Going about Bakersfield one night, I got hopelessly lost and ended up at a chain-link fence. Behind the fence were thousands of oil pumps, nodding up and down like so many giant plastic drinking birds.
This kind of sentence makes me realize how rarely I make use of such visual imagery in my own writing. That is something for me to work on.