Word: paragraphed
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...world is both flamboyant and bizarre, as his native country can often seem, but there are several off-kilter moments, strange observational lapses that flaw the fictional universe. The novel's first paragraph sets the scene for Caracera's father's funeral: "It was not a good day for a funeral procession. Temperature: ninety-two at one p.m. and expected to rise to a hundred and ten before day's end." This steep a rise in the course of an afternoon is all but impossible, as anyone with a passing familiarity with the region's weather knows; anyway, it never...
...final deadline advances, the newsroom is all silent concentration. Cleaners come and go. While the third edition cut-off is officially 12.30 a.m., changes can be made for another half-hour, and with 15 min. left, deputy night editor Helen McCabe spots a weak first paragraph. Eleven hours into her shift, she coolly begins rewriting. Within minutes the story's refiled, and the paper is done and gone. Journalist friends say they can't understand why she gave up writing, but "the buzz of getting a byline or a splash is the same buzz I get from this," she says...
...last winter, his charm on the stump wowed the Washington political establishment--some of whom predicted Kerry would never pick a running mate who was so certain to upstage him. And Edwards already is, managing to put more punch into a single sentence than Kerry can in an entire paragraph. Kerry has a tendency to describe the contrast between Bush's foreign policy and his own with a thicket of civics-book phrases like unilateral, multilateralism, community of nations and America's relationship with the world. But at the Democrats' first rally together in Cleveland, Ohio, Edwards made the same...
...only direct reference to God in the Declaration of Independence comes in the first paragraph, in which Thomas Jefferson and his fellow drafters of that document--including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams--invoke the "laws of nature and of nature's god." (The absence of capitalization was the way Jefferson wrote it, though the final parchment capitalizes all four nouns.) The phrase "nature's god" reflected Jefferson's deism--his rather vague Enlightenment-era belief, which he shared with Franklin, in a Creator whose divine handiwork is evident in the wonders of nature. Deists like Jefferson did not believe...
...first rough draft of the Declaration, Jefferson began his famous second paragraph: "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable ..." The draft shows Franklin's heavy printer's pen crossing out the phrase with backslashes and changing it to "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Our rights derive from nature and are secured "by the consent of the governed," Franklin felt, not by the dictates or dogmas of any particular religion. Later in that same sentence, however, we see what was likely the influence of Adams, a more doctrinaire product of Puritan Massachusetts. In his rough draft...