With her heart pounding and blood rushing, the crowd cheering and speakers blaring, their coach nodding and fans watching, she took the ice with her hand grasping her partner’s, imagining the worst, hoping for the best, and knowing that everything was riding on this one moment, this one 3 minute moment, which would forever define her as a winner or a loser, competent or inadequate, successful or regrettable, famous or anonymous, and all she could think was, “He’d better not mess this up.”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This is a very good sentence. Although only about 75 words in length, I personally was really able to imagine a whole scene of events. I also liked how you put us inside the head of a skater (coincidentally around the Winter Olympics), because most of us don't really know what it's like. Now we can kind of get the idea, and it sounds a little frightening to be honest. However, I'm sure you have fun doing it!
ReplyDeleteI really like this sentence because it vividly described not only the scene but also her internal feelings. The word choice of “cheering”, “blaring”, “nodding” and “watching” has done an excellent job to appeal your auditory and visual senses and makes it very easy to picture the spectacle of ice skating. Moreover, the words that describe the skater such as “heart pounding and blood rushing” and “grasping” bring the readers into the scene.
ReplyDeleteIn term of structure, the technique of parallelism is used very effectively in introducing series of phrases to describe the excitement of the competition. Also, four pairs of antonyms, “a winner or a loser, competent or inadequate, successful or regrettable, famous or anonymous”, were used in parallel to depict the intensity of the moment, which not only form a delicate balance of rhythm, but also further highlight the nervous feelings of the skater.
Finally, I like how the whole sentence of clever contrast and parallelism was ended with a fairly colloquial line, “He’d better not mess this up.” The fall of the diction level brought us from the spectacular scene to zoom into her mind and there starts the show.
I really liked this sentence personally. I mostly enjoyed how it was like we were listening to her thoughts, which, for me, made it easier to identify with her and to understand what was really going on. I also like the relevance of the sentence, because as I was reading it all I could think about was the Olympics and I am not sure if that was the effect you were going for but it was the first thing that my mind thought about. I really like, when reading, you can imagine what is going on in your head, the imagery was great for that and it was an easy sentence to follow.
ReplyDeleteOne quote I really enjoyed was “imagining the worst, hoping for the best,” it is a contrarium because of the two opposing statements, imagining and hoping, and worst and best. I think this helps with imaging what is going through the skater’s head because, as in any athlete, there is that possibility of failing but always striving and hoping for the best. Another quote that uses one of our rhetorical schemes is, “famous or anonymous,” this is an example of an assonance where there is repetition in the vowel sounds, here the vowel sound is repeated in the “-ous” of the two words. And finally another rhetorical scheme that I found was in the beginning of the sentence, “With her heart pounding and blood rushing, the crowd cheering and speakers blaring, their coach nodding and fans watching,” it is a tricolon because of the repetition of the structure of the verbs. There are three parts, the first is all the endings are –ing endings and then they are put into sets of two.
Lastly I enjoyed the final line, “He’d better not mess this up,” because after an entire sentence of dramatic imagery, it added a little humor and it lightened the mood a bit. I also think it says a lot about her, because it makes her sound extremely confident in herself, and if they were to not do well it would be because of the man, that can be a good characteristic or bad depending on how you look at the situation.
I really like the sentence because it really feels like something that people can relate to by speaking out the thoughts of the skater. While reading the sentence, I can picture almost a slow motion of THE moment in a biographic movie of a famous skater. I also really liked "imagining the worst, hoping for the best" because the sense of contrast and contradiction that the phrase precisely grasped of what the person was thinking. We, while reading the sentence, can feel the nervousness just like while we are watching the Olympics, hoping that our favorite skater won't have any big mistakes while he is doing his work. I think in this moment of nervousness, one of our feeling is always, I don't know how I could handle this pressure if I were the performer and exactly, this phrase captured this defining mental situation.
ReplyDeleteI think the last sentence also left a sense of humor with in this quite nervous, big moment sentence and make people laugh at the end and thinking, exactly. I think achieving these kind of effects with the audience is successful and that what make me like this sentence a lot.