Low / Middle Style
Mother of Epic Sax Gorilla Celebrates Mother’s Day at Cheney Stadium 
Rhubarb Tries a New Look 
Epic Sax Gorilla Warming Up
Lost in the World is my hybrid of middle and low styles, which means I intend it to be a teaching tool, something that can be easily understood by a wide audience, something that hopes to expand the knowledge of the reader, yet with the middle style it is meant to not only teach but delight. Middle style’s entire purpose is to make the reading experience fun. It’s meant to employ numerous rhetorical devices in an effort to make readers want to read the piece of writing. Both styles are formatted into chunks easily understood or digested by readers. The content is not so lexically dense– ratio of content to function words–that readers lose half the information they read.
While low style asks to be read once with the reader leaving better informed, middle style begs to be read many times over, it wants readers to stop and reread passages within it purely for the enjoyment of experiencing the writing again. Middle style uses elements of low style like cohesion–the known-knew principle– to create a flow of information from one sentence to the next. What is unique to middle style, is that also uses other techniques, like parallelism and anaphora, to create a flow not only of information, but of sound.
The middle style intent is to create a fun experience for the mind, it is something that could be read aloud as its audible presence is clever, could be considered poetic, especially when it employs tools of sound like consonance, assonance, and alliteration. The former two are when you place words containing similar consonant or vowel sounds in the same vicinity. And the latter is the use of words starting with the same letter in close proximity to one other.
In my writing, I go crazy with the parallelism– making list after list and sentence after sentence that have the same grammatical structure either in series or ‘paralleled’ on either side of an and, but, or some other conjunction. I like to use short, emphatic sentences to establish a point, a base to move my writing from. Passive voice is employed throughout to establish focus on the mascot’s actions more so than the mascot himself, for that’s exactly what the person inside the suit desires, a sense of anonymity, a separation from the individual. I use sensory details to establish the physical elements of being a mascot that could not be known unless you had actually been one– the visual and auditory limitations of the suit, its humid and stinky air. I use rhetorical questions to encourage readers to consider their own experiences with mascots.
I used emulations from both Tom Robbins and David Foster Wallace to expand my capacity and technique for expressing an intended point.
