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Tasty Verbiage
the potato salad approach to writing style
It’s Saturday on a warm weekend in September. You have entered the Potato Salad Contest sponsored by your local community event center, which occurs tomorrow. You are in your kitchen making the salad that you are going to enter into the contest. [If you’re not a paid Medium member yet, you can keep reading this for free by clicking HERE.]
You decide to keep it simple. You make a huge pile of mashed potatoes in a large crockery bowl, using those potato flakes you bought at Kroger’s last month. You use a bit more of the flakes than the recipe on the box calls for, because you want to keep it nice and stiff. When it’s all blended, you add a tiny bit of vinegar so it will taste like you put some mayonnaise and dill pickle relish in it. Then you add a tiny bit of unsweetened eggnog, so it will taste like you put some hard-boiled eggs in. You give it one final stir and put it in the fridge till tomorrow. But not before sprinkling some ground black pepper over the finished product, to give it a hint of color.
Not that black pepper is really a color, but at least it adds interest, if nothing else.
Meanwhile, your neighbor Marvin has also decided to enter the contest. He decides to take a much more unusual approach. He bakes his…
