Sample Pastiches
Eating disorders have a way of dragging you down, making you feel like you are really worth nothing, like gum on the bottom on someone’s shoe. Some people have trouble seeing the end of the dark and miserable tunnel that has become their lives, one of those people being my daughter Allison. I don’t know, nothing really seemed wrong with her at first but her stomach just kept getting smaller and smaller and she didn’t look so good. All of the life had drained from her once full face, her eyes sunk back into their sockets, her cheek bones stuck out real far and her bubbly voice was replaced with silence. It was real scary, and nobody really knew how to snap her out of whatever trance she was in. Her stomach was just getting smaller and smaller. Her cheek bones were protruding. My daughter was gone.
I felt lost inside. I knew there was something better out there, that I could make it through this hard time, but I just couldn’t make myself fight anymore. My body felt weak and my soul felt empty. The number on the scale was defining my life, determined when I would eat my next meal, if I would eat my next meal. I couldn’t tell anyone, my parents, my friends, because they just wouldn’t get it. They wouldn’t know what it felt like to lose control of your life, to see yourself as a number on a scale. They wouldn’t know what it felt like to be suffering alone. They wouldn’t know what it was like to live with an eating disorder.
Literary Devices: Imagery, Similes, Descriptive Language
This wall that divides Germany casts a shadow of despair over all of Europe. The tall wall that divides both East and West is like a status of depression. To the left, I see a prosperous city with a thriving economy. To the east I only see gloom and darkness. This wall is a sign of rebuilding from the ashes of decades ago. Among the rebuilding is the failure of communism and its tragic ideas that some people think is prosperous. This wall of the dominion of communism has brought communism closer to failure. A closed gate will only bring destruction. If you want no destruction, then bring down the wall of separation. This wall is war. This wall is terror. I invite all the believers to stand up to this threat. To stand up against the wall. I can see the citizens of East and West Berlin gathering together, raging the darkest of fires and then hottest of flames. These flames are Germany’s last hope. The flames will bring them peace and prosperity. This type of love is viciously violent. The citizens want a government that does not tolerate them. They want a government that will suppress them, yet they support them. Abandon this government for it is not the answer you are looking for.
Literary Devices: Short Syntax (not really a sentence for effect), Hyperbolic language, Imagery
It is hard to forget that day in November of 1917. Walking through the train station that morning, the polite silences were deafening, the averted stares pointed and penetrating despite their urgent targets along the monotonous sidewalk. I could see it in their eyes. I was the perfect Frankenstein’s monster, an odd assembly of parts that the war had rearranged and disfigured and set incongruously loose among the public, helplessly doomed to torment innocent civilians. Every person tried so painfully hard to ignore the shrapnelsized gouge that had claimed the cavity of my right eyeball, but it demanded attention like the harsh and indisputable command of a drill sergeant. I now carried the war in every way imaginable; the trenches had hollowed out the landscape of my emotions, dug through my memories, and at this point I even carried one on the very surface of my face. I could hear Johnson in the back of my mind as I stepped through the doors of the ValdeGrace Military Hospital “Damn near well got your face blown off, kid. Not that there’s much as you can do ‘bout it now, but don’t stick your head so high up from the trench next time. There’s a moral somewhere in there, something about” “Hi there, here for Mrs. Ladd?” Gingerly, she pressed the mask against my face and stretched the elastic around my head to tighten it just above my ears. It fit just right, one of the easier molds to shape she had said. I don’t remember now the entire process of the maskmaking, but I do know it was a long day of taking measurements, pressing molds, sculpting, readjusting, matching paint to my skin tones, creating for me a new face. When Mrs. Ladd stepped back and beamed, “You’re all set,” I did not have the words to thank her I still in all these years after the war have not been able to express my immense gratitude for the woman who could make the monster human, ready again for civil life. I whispered a thank you and mustered a tearful hug, and I think that although I could not say it right she understood. I waved, offered my farewells to her staff, and walked out the door. My struggles with the war were not over in fact, they had hardly begun. Yet, somehow, the mask for me was the first scoop of dirt back into the trenches that had gnawed through my being. At least outwardly, I could show the world that one of them had been filled.
Literary Devices: Vivid Description/Imagery, characterization, Terse dialogue