Fog everywhere

The first part of the snippet is one of the most fun: a short, punchy fragment that announces the intrusion.

Fog everywhere.

Bleak House(1852)

So we have exactly two words:

The intrusion
The scale of the effect

The first word, announcing the intrusion, is going to be one that you repeat throughout the rest of this variation.

So choose that word carefully!

For example, one of our worked examples is going to be about humidity in the subtropical Australian city of Brisbane.

But is humidity really the word we want to repeat over and over again? It's four syllables, which makes it kind of awkward. It doesn't have the punch of a one-syllable word like 'fog'.

What if we shortened it to 'humid'?

Humid air.

Too humid.

That's getting better. But maybe an even punchier choice is the word 'sweat'.

Sweat city.

The second word, indicating the scale of the problem, is one you can play around with. (You can even swap the word order if you want.)

Here's our opening for the example about alligators in Tampa, Florida:

Gators galore.

Write your variation here. Think punchy and big.

I'll bet if someone asked you to start writing like a 19th Century English writer you would start writing in long, waffling sentences stuffed with the most elaborate words that you can think of.

But look at this first sentence! So punchy! So direct!

No waffling, no messing around.

Straight to it.

Let's write the next sentence.

Writelike Charles Dickens: The fog in Bleak House