Mimicking the Style of Rick Atkinson

                For this week we were assigned the problem of finding a paragraph we liked in a historical themed book, dissecting it to discover how it works and mimicking the prose in our own attempt at a paragraph. I decided to draw my paragraph from the book An Army At Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-43 (Volume one of The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson.

               I read this book a few years back on a whim; it was the first time I had encountered the writings of Rick Atkinson. I had been looking to learn more about the North African campaign during World War II and the white and orange cover was eye catching. I discovered, upon reading the first chapter, what a truly great writer Mr. Atkinson was—In context it is not surprising that the he had been awarded the Pulitzer prize in the past.

               So when we were assigned this week’s problem Mr. Atkinson’s book was one of the first to spring to mind. It was a hard call, picking just one paragraph. It was made especially hard considering that one of Mr. Atkinson’s strong points in writing is alternating a paragraph with tactical details with one which focuses more on the human element and backstory of an individual. In the end I settled for one of the individual-centric paragraphs found in Chapter 4 “Pushing East” under the subsection Fat Geese on a Pond on page 187. The paragraph chosen flows like this:

This order greatly pleased the Americans, even if no one was quite sure what “tank-infested” meant or how to effect such a teeming condition. The 1^st Battalion—part of a regiment created in the 1830s for the Black Hawk War and still heavily drawn from Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia—was commanded by the handsome thirty-five-year-old John Knight Waters. The son of a Baltimore banker, Waters had attended Johns Hopkins University for two years before persuading a Chicago congressman, in whose district he had spent a single day, to appoint him to the West Point class of 1931. Water’s ambition to be a pilot was thwarted by imperfect eyesight; he settled for the cavalry and betrothal to the daughter of a crotchety major named Patton. “Waters, I don’t know you. Come back in three years,” Patton told the young lieutenant when asked for permission to marry. Waters bided his time, eventually winning both Patton’s deep affection and his daughter.

               The first element that popped out about this paragraph was how Atkinson interweaves factual information with personal, more sensory loaded, descriptions. The understated hyperbole utilizing adverbs and wording of the sentences where one thing is claimed then made ironic in the second half of the sentence, such as in sentence one,  lends to what would be a dry paragraph of exposition an underlying sense of humor and irony that keeps the reader interested. Adjectives are a favorite element of Atkinson and are spiced throughout this paragraph and the book in general in such a way that they paint a visual “scene” of what is being described. As the latter half of the paragraph shows, Atkinson does not work just with visual terms but with dialog as well. The quoted lines of Patton, terse as they are, help to lend personality to the person being painted and establish, better than any adjective, what he was like and how he thought. Syntax used in this way is a window into a character’s mental state, beliefs and soul.

               The grammatical elements of this paragraph are unique and invocative of Atkinson’s general writing style. He prefer to write in third person but skillful use of dialog and phrasing helps it to feel closer, like first person, instead of cold and distant psychologically for the reader. The lengths of each sentence vary, however he has a preference for long sentences linked with , —; and : (I also have a preference for this in my writing style, but I don’t manage to pull it off as coherently as he does). Often times extra information not strictly on topic to the sentence at hand is marked off  using , and —. Additionally, he wisely varies which grammatical element he uses to link ideas in his sentences together, never using the same one too often in a paragraph, making the structure of the paragraph on the whole more creative. Another quirk I noticed is that he prefers to start his sentences with a noun, usually the noun being the sentence’s subject that is being modified and described. For example “The order,” “The 1^st Battalion,” “Water’s ambition,” etc. Following the opening subject/noun almost always is the modifying verb of what the subject is doing “The order greatly pleased,” “The 1^st Battalion—…—was commanded,” “Waters had attended,” etc. Note that the majority of verbs are in past tense.

                The second part of this project is to take the style that has been explored and make it into our own. Accordingly, here is my parrot paragraph:

                It was “not a riot. It was an absolute massacre by the police” General Philip Henry Sheridan confided to General Grant by written word on August 2^nd, 1866; just days after the riot wound down. Sheridan, while officially in control of the area for the military, was being covered by General Baird during the time of the riot. He expressed an authoritatively definitive view on the New Orleans riot—having witnessed the atrocities in hindsight from his perch in Texas—and went on to proclaim that it “was not excelled in murderous cruelty by that of Fort Pillow. It was a murder which the mayor and police of the city perpetrated without the shadow of a necessity.” Necessary and its fleet shadow proved to be a slippery concept to define. The thirty-five-year-old Sheridan, being of the Republican persuasion, was not unusual in taking such a glass-half-empty perspective on the matter. His intuitive conclusion proved to be a bullseye on the element of corruption, yet far off the mark on other equally vital aspects. Time, and a congressional report or two, showed exactly where the truthfulness of his statement lay.

Advertisement