You won't be jolly after eating a Jolly Roger

High quality art. I do work on commission. Call me!

Jolly Rogers are at best unoriginal – at worst debilitating. "Bursting with Bold Fruit Flavor"? More like bursting with evil. Accidentally bite down on a Jolly Roger and in return it will viciously, violently, voraciously rip your fillings from their comfortable, happy home in your mouth. This one tiny candy will make you choke down bits of dental-grade porcelain, sending you to painful hours in the dentist's chair. Enjoy Sour Apple? Enjoy these sour grapes: The tart acids and sugar will corrode your defenseless, wholesome tooth enamel like battery acid. At 17 calories each, Jolly Rogers might seem like a prudent indulgence, but you are deceived. Jolly Rogers are miscreants – a counterculture confection masquerading as a harmless hard candy while waiting to drag you behind the bushes and ravish your teeth. Don't be fooled. Eat [marshmallows] and keep your teeth.

* * *

Names were changed to protect the innocent. (Innocent = me! Don't sue me, bro.) This is another short writing piece from a rhetoric class. The assignment was to use only 150 words to write an Invective warning about the evil nature of a specific candy. We had to use various rhetorical schemes and tropes. I love Jolly Rogers, but I had to take a shot at somebody. The "evil" of Jolly Rogers was so prevalent in my parents' circles that even those of us who did not have fillings were not allowed to eat Jolly Rogers for fear of our teeth accidentally being pulled out from the roots or some such silliness. Or at least, that's what my 5 year old mind chose to remember. :)

Extra credit super bonus points and bragging rights to anyone who names the rhetorical schemes and tropes!

Stage 2 Procrastination

I should be studying Chinese right now, but instead I'm making a blog post. Huzzah. I decided that I would begin posting some of my in-class writing here, since I don't have much other writing these days to speak of. (Aside from journal entries that read like, "Gee my life sucks, when will I graduate? I think I'll be fat forever ..." etc. But, we won't talk about those here. Ahem.) My previous blog post was an in-class assignment and I just thought I'd let you know there may be more in the future! I may actually post some of the more creative papers I've written this semester, if they're short enough. Cheers.

The Country (Hypotaxis)

After the sun rises, I lumber out of bed and sloppily throw on overalls. Although there's still sleep in my eyes, once I drink a tall glass of milk I'm ready to tackle my chores. If I finish my chores I can play in the pond with the frogs. Mid-morning turns into afternoon, afternoon turns into evening, and soon I realize I've spent the whole day romping around the fields with my dog. But the best part -- what I've been waiting for -- is when Gram and I sit on the porch with milk and cookies watching the sunset.

----

This was part of an in class writing assignment to write a short, Hypotaxis-style paragraph about a day in the country. I modified it slightly to make it a drabble. (As I understand it, Hypotaxis is about subordination of clauses. It's a particular style of writing that joins clauses to create a hierarchy, such that everything builds to the end of the paragraph where the "pay off," the most important piece is.)