True Confessions: Bloggers’ Writing Quirks

A post as close to my heart as it gets. Those dashes is my personal quirk. Rare are occasions when I am able to deny a dash a loving entry into my writing. And oh, am I in love with my sentences. So what if they have the potential of being a mini short story unto themselves.
A brilliant post.

The Daily Post

Part of having a unique writing voice is embracing the verbal tics that you turn to again and again — those words and ways of phrasing that some call “bad habits,” but I prefer to reframe as “writing quirks.”

Think you’re the only one who uses tons of em dashes or starts sentences with “and” or “but”? Check out our editors’ quirks, and then feel better about (and embrace!) your own:

Michelle Weber

I’m morethan a littleobsessed with fakefootnotes.* (Well, that and semicolons; if you’re read more than two sentences I’ve written, you’ve probably figured the semicolon thing out already.)

Because of an excess of schooling in my formative years, I stuff unrelated historical references into my posts — even if what I’m writing about has nothing to do with 16th century monastic rules, I’ll shoehorn them in***. I can also get a little harshsarcastic pointed in my personal writing. In both…

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McLeodganj: The Tibetan Way of Life

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Dharamsala, Himachal, himalayas, McLeodganj, monastery, nature, photography, road drives, stone piles, Thukpa, Tibetan, wanderlust

A very recent personal celebration of ours sent me and A into the hills, to seek out some quiet, the rolling vistas, the easy conversations of the pahadi people, the musty book stores, an unhindered palette of food options, and huge helpings of the outdoors. McLeodganj was where we landed.

A monk bargains for some fresh market produce

Through the winding roads along the Beas, I lay awake, probably in a trance, as the bus

That girl before Aila – Through the eyes of a child in the Sundarbans

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Aila, Bay of Bengal, Bengali, cyclone, delta, environment, ferry, fiction, Hooghly river, Indian Ocean, narration, nature, ocean, people, photography, responsible travel, school, story, sundarbans, tide, travel, wanderlust

Aila tore the island up. She roared and worked her way through till her guttural growls deafened the island, felled trees, snatched at the thatched roofs. The government had not yet installed any electric poles. May be this was the good that was to come of it. None to be uprooted – nobody electrocuted.

Battling the tides… Sundarbans

She’d been born of the ocean a few days back, visions of the distant hapless islands fuelling her with speed whilst she eyed the lands viciously, almost savagely. She entered Bengal with a screaming howl, flattening everything and claiming all those piteous mounds of earths back – 20 feet of brackish water swirling through the villages and jungles of Sundarbans.

Where the Goddess takes avatar – Kumartuli, Kolkata

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artisans, clay, D5100, Durga Puja, environment, featured, ferry, Hooghly river, idols, Kolkata, Kumartuli, photography, straw, travel, wanderlust

As a wanderer, I have been to places that have made me squeal in happiness, and others that have silenced me in awe. Places that make the camera junkie in me go shutters(!), and others that render me motionless. But at times, I have chanced upon places that have made me experience all of that at once – placed that have rendered me speechless!

Where the dead lay – South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata

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cemetery, Derozio, featured, Flury's, Indo-sarcenic architecture, Kolkata, oldest grave in Calcutta, Park Street, Peter Cat, photography, South Park Street Cemetery, sunset, travel, wanderlust

There are cities where you regale in the luxuries and let yourself be pampered. There are cities where you cannot help but complain about the state it lies in. And then there are cities where even though you complain, you still bathe in its charm. For you revel in its character like none other. Kolkata – truly a city of the lords, that now seems at least two decades behind the other Indian metropolises.

Eternal, South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata

A city where the old and the new stand juxtaposed. A city that enamors you into a time warp. I decided to nose around one of the city’s oldest parts and yet one where the posh hobnobbed. ‘Twas where I started my jaunt. Where I let myself be. Park Street.