Great Beginnings

This is the opening paragraph to one of my favorite books, “Watership Down”:

“The primroses were over. Towards the edge of the wood, where the ground became open and sloped down to an old fence and a brambly ditch beyond, only a few fading patches of pale yellow still showed among the dog's mercury and oak-tree roots. On the other side of the fence, the upper part of the field was full of rabbit-holes. In places the grass was gone altogether and everywhere there were clusters of dry droppings, through which nothing but the ragwort would grow. A hundred yards away, at the bottom of the slope, ran the brook, no more than three feet wide, half-choked with king-cups, water-cress and blue brook-lime. The cart-track crossed by a brick culvert and climbed the opposite slope to a five-barred gate in the thorn hedge. The gate led into the lane.”

I feel this is a great beginning due to the amount of detail offered by the author, Richard Adams. It reminds me of narrative leads, which we just studied. I wasn’t as familiar with this type of headline and I enjoyed reading the examples I found for the assignment we did. The amount of detail in found in this type of headline aids in capturing my attention and entices me to want to read on. Such a level of detail and description is found through the entirety of “Watership Down”, and reading this novel is still one of my favorite reading experiences, as I literally could not put the back down for the last 100 pages or so.

Editing Mistake

I continue to be astounded at the sloppiness in some emails I receive at work. I know that people make errors in writing work-related emails rather frequently (including some of my own), but some days it seems to me that people don’t even glance over there emails before sending them:

“The VTIT registration is not actually a license, they are a registration and there is different in this state.”

It took a few times reading this sentence to realize what the sender of the email had intended to write was “…and there is a difference…”