Descriptive Sketch
This essay, a past winner of the Dean's Award for First-Year Writing, was first written for a first-year English class. Unlike the preceding journal entries, it is a finished, highly polished piece of work.
Note the following stylistic elements:
- Sentence variety Part of the assignment was to blend sentence types: simple, compound, complex, compound-complex. The progression in the first paragraph, for example, is: complex . . . compound . . . simple . . . compound-complex. Note the changing sentence lengths, too: 19, 28, 4, 31 words.
- Creative language choices E.G., "dirty heap of eccentricity," "The room . . . folded us into its smoke and clamor," "The jazz swung on Annie's hips."
- Economy We can see this in the verbs. Instead of passives or other wordy constructions, the author relies on crisp active verbs that pulse with the same energy she attributes to Annie's (e.g., "slammed," "breezed," "tumbled," "sparkles."
Midnight Jazz at Annie's
I liked Old City when it was a dirty heap of eccentricity on the north end of Central Avenue. Back then the police didn't roost in pairs on the corner with their hands on their hips, and the charm of that particular block was its irrepressible energy. It had raw sophistication. Big Don's Elegant Junk and Costumier was there then, as was North Central Barber Shop, and right beside the train tracks, across from the Greyhound station, was Annie's, a jazz club.
We went to the Old City on Friday nights in the summer, my friend and I. After the car doors slammed, we could hear only the clicking of a few shoes behind us on the sidewalk and the flow of our own easy chatter; but we felt Annie's from a block away. We breezed in under the awning and through the door, and the room immediately folded us into its smoke and clamor. We laid claim to our table and played with the candle while we waited for the music to start.
At this point, Annie began to prowl. Annie was the owner of the place. She was a black-haired, black-eyed, early middle-aged, well dressed, British accented peacock with a reputation for being quite the free spirit, to say the least. You couldn't miss Annie, particularly if you were male. She swayed from table to table, kissing every man in the room heartily and shamelessly, and if there was any response from a wife or a lover, Annie was not the least bit concerned with it. The jazz began and it swung on Annie's hips.
People made efforts to continue their conversations for a few minutes into the music, but they soon realized the pointlessness of that. You came to Annie's to feel, not to talk. So they all drank burgundy from thick, heavy glasses and smiled with warm, red-stained lips about something everyone seemed to understand just then. Saxophone, keyboard, and drums trembled in the tables and the chairs, up through my fingertips and into my ribcage. I was lost and I didn't care, so I sat and stared at my friend's graceful hands on the table, at his fingers strumming the tabletop or smoothing a droplet on the stem of his glass.
When it all ended abruptly, we tumbled, ears ringing, back onto the sidewalk of Old City. We talked nonsense about buying the building on the corner and turning it into our own place, a coffeehouse of extraordinary magnitude, where expression and beauty would manifest themselves in every art form and seep into the walls to become ingrained and genuine. In all honesty, we probably wanted to be near Annie, to be part of her energy forever. Most everyone did. Now the place on the corner is Sullivan's Pub and we don't own it. On that block there are four clubs, three shops, a gallery and a theater, but Annie's still sparkles by the train tracks and makes everything real. Old City grew up around Annie and she is its lifeblood.
-- Laurel Nesbitt