I'm writing this today which will be yesterday by the time you read it so you could say I'm writing this for you for tomorrow. Follow me?
Good meeting you all today...wait a minute...since I wrote this today, which by now is yesterday and at least twelve hours prior to making your acquaintances, how do I know that it was good meeting you all? How do I know that meeting you wasn't rather unpleasant? A bit icky. It very well might have been akin to fingernails slowly screeching down an old blackboard. Perhaps it was as enjoyable as ravenously biting into a chicken sandwich only to realize that the slimy, chewy texture that is rolling around the inside of your mouth is actually a raw piece of animal flesh. Meeting you might also have filled me with the same amount of pleasure that would be derived from three minutes in the Octagon with Anderson Silva. Ouch!
Okay, you see what I did there? That's right...AMPLIFICATION! I took one idea and expanded and enriched the explanation. That's what we did in class today...uh...I mean tomorrow...uh...you get the idea. Anyway, through amplification you allow an idea to really take hold in a reader's mind. It's great fun and effective writing. Don't believe me? Just listen to what author Richard Lanham (A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms) has to say: "Amplification provides a redundancy of information...for a memorable syntax and diction." We all want our writing to be memorable. Why not try some amplification? Of course, you don't want to overuse it, but keep it in your notebook of writing ideas and bring it out at an opportune time.
Remember, you'll want to type what we did in class today--proper heading:
NAME
DATE
PERIOD
TYPE OF PAPER
--and bring it to class tomorrow.
See you then.
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