In each of my imitation pieces, I attempted to match the style and tone each author used. I picked stories from my own life that I could tell using one of my chosen authors' voices, as I was most concerned about not directly copying the author's words or voice exactly but instead to mimic it. I tried to use similar sentence lengths, styles, voice (active or passive), focus, and distance between the author and the essay in my imitations as appropriate.
My first imitation piece is based on Susan Allen Toth's essay "Going to the Movies." Her voice in this piece heavily leans on summary and scene with very little reflection. It seems as if Toth as the author is very distant from the text and events at hand despite her direct involvement in the scene, as her opinions are almost completely absent from the majority of the essay. I also tried to use active voice and a shorter sentence style with minimal adjectives. This part of imitating Toth was especially difficult for me. My writing voice tends to use passive verbs and tenses, many adjectives, and I hate using too many short sentences. In my imitation I talk about eating dinner with different people, just as Toth describes going to the movies with different people. It feels like I'm not including the details I would normally include in such a story, but in Toth's style I feel there isn't room for those details, except in very brief and vivid depictions of minute scenes using a minimal number of words. One thing I found especially helpful in imitating Toth was to re-read her essay multiple times and to copy out (by hand) various passages of the essay to internalize the stylistic components necessary to her voice.
My second imitation is based on David Sedaris' essay "Me Talk Pretty One Day." In this essay, Sedaris seems to describe scenes in vivid detail with intermixed reflections on and interpretations of the scene. He uses lots of dialogue, a conversational and colloquial tone, and undercut punch-lines following dramatic buildup. Sedaris also avoids parentheses like the plague, but uses commas instead to group ideas, which is very different from my natural writing style that employs a mix of these two strategies. My imitation's subject is medical school admissions and interview trips. It was difficult for me to sense whether or not I was overdoing the humor or not as I wrote the essay, but I read each paragraph out loud after I wrote it. This helped me realize whether or not the humor was working, and I frequently stopped myself halfway through sentences to rewrite them. Another strategy I used was to write following a continuous train of thought, which helped me reach the humor and very specific situations that I find characteristic of Sedaris. He is one of my favorite authors, and I have read many of his books of essays. This background made it easier for me to pick out parts of his writing style that are specifically his and helped me to better match that style.
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