Shooting An Elephant

In George Orwell’s essay Shooting an Elephant, he created a masterpiece that conveyed his undeniable control of language and style. He stated “And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant (Orwell).” The impact of the sentence would have been lost in the midst of a period if he had chosen to kill his sentence after the word “killed”. Instead, the lifelong anti-Stalinist chose to implement the beautiful punctuation mark that most unskilled, amateur writers fear (BBC). The Wordwatch Towers, a “plain language guide to punctuation, grammar, and writing well”, advocates the three rules of thumb when implementing a semicolon in formal writing. …show more content…
Approximately 150 years after President Lincoln made this colonial tradition into a national holiday, a vibrant dining room filled with children’s laughter hosts the creation of hand turkeys as the aroma of fresh baked rolls floats through the home. Two sisters are laughing in the kitchen while watching their children play awaiting the arrival of their mother and father when the ear piercing sound of the landline fills the home. The eldest sister answers the phone, talking in quick hushed whispers, with a look of despair on her face. With shaking hands, she hangs the phone up then in the blink of an eye composes herself. She calmly asks her sister and brother-in-law to speak to her in the garage for a moment. She delivers the news that their father was voluntarily admitted to a stress center after walking himself into his garage with the full intent to hang himself. Fortunately before he acted on his thought, something snapped in his mind prompting him to walk back in the house and inform his wife of his plans. Not wanting to upset the children, the parents reentered the house to tell the kids that grandpa had a stomach ache so we would celebrate Thanksgiving later. The sisters rushed off to the hospital as the rolls burned in the oven and the kids cleaned up the hand turkeys. The family has never addressed the event since, but the potential loss haunts every holiday as the elephant in the room stands tall just as the mind clouding stench of burnt rolls sticks in a

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Shooting Of An Elephant

Imperialism In Shooting An Elephant