
English Teacher
You didn't ask me to be Dickens.![]()
Remember - if you don't use correct capitalisation, punctuation and spacing, anything you write will be incorrect.
I really don't care for oozes there. (The things that ooze are usually things you don't want to have to deal with.)
Not a professional teacher
I'm not a teacher. I speak American English. I've tutored writing at the University of Southern Maine and have done a good deal of copy editing and writing, occasionally for publication.
Are you talking about this?
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
It is pretty damn good!
Let's not all write like the same person. That would be boring. Let's write like ourselves. That's more entertaining.
By the way, here's a short story you might look for, about someone who figured out how to write like someone else:
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (original Spanish title: "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote") by Jorge Luis Borges
It's in the Borges anthology Labyrinths.
I'm not a teacher. I speak American English. I've tutored writing at the University of Southern Maine and have done a good deal of copy editing and writing, occasionally for publication.