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Australia’s highways are littered with the ghosts of road-accident victims.
Early one morning in the 1980s, 19 cars were involved in a pileup on the Mornington Peninsula Freeway in Victoria, Australia. The motorists claimed that they had swerved to avoid hitting a misty, floating human shape that then disappeared. Could it be that they had seen the ghost of someone who had died on that highway?
It is easy to dismiss the wraith that haunts the Mornington Peninsula Freeway as a trick of the light, fog or morning mist. But it is difficult to explain it away when hundreds of people declare they have seen the phantom, which some say had been around for 10 years prior to the 19-car pileup. One woman recalled, “I was driving with my husband when the grey misty shape of a woman suddenly hurled itself in front of the car. I was so frightened I almost swerved off the road.”
Despite the many witness accounts of encounters with ghosts, there are no experts on the subject, only theories. One common theory is that ghosts are imprints in a dimension close to our own of people who have died but do not know it. In other words, they are earthbound. Apparently, this happens in the case of sudden death, such as a road accident. According to psychic and author, Sylvia Browne, time is meaningless in the immediate, after-death dimension. A traumatised road-accident victim, therefore, can remain in those first few minutes after death and re-enact the trauma over and over again, which in our dimension could last for years, even centuries.
So, could it be that the phantom set of headlights flying down King George Avenue in Tamworth, New South Wales, late at night is a re-enacting of a drag car race gone wrong? King George Avenue used to be a popular drag car racing strip where many people crashed and died.
It is doubtful that highway ghosts set out deliberately to kill people. These hapless ghosts are probably not even aware of us. It is more likely that the sight of them spooks drivers, who then swerve to avoid hitting them. But who knows? Certainly, no one in our dimension ever will. If we accept that ghosts exist, the idea that a person can hang around after death and scare people half out of their wits adds a tantalising element to our ponderings about life and death.
References
John Pinkney, Haunted: The Book of Australia’s Ghosts, The Five Mile Press, Victoria, 2005.
Sylvia Browne, The Other Side and Back, Signet, USA, 2000.
Three practical ways to transform bland into gripping.
Dull writing is wordy, passive, vague and listless. It has no rhythm, is hard to understand, and abuses language. Some of the culprits are easy to identify. To fix them is a matter of technique.
It may seem that a good writer has more talent than the rest of us, but like any skill, developing a good writing style is a matter of mastering specific techniques. You can transform any piece of dreary writing by identifying and eliminating three culprits of tedium: overused prepositions, lacklustre verbs, and meaningless nominalisations.
Slash the prepositions
There are about 150 prepositions in the English language. While they are essential to writing, their overuse results in wordiness and passive-voice sentences. Examples are above, against, by, of, with. Some prepositional phrases are at the beach, under the chair, on the bridge. Compound prepositional phrases are with respect to, in reference to, for the purposes of.
The following "before" examples are from real websites that offer writing services. The "after" examples demonstrate how the clutter produced by prepositions can be eliminated.
- Before: Our writers work in close proximity with the clients to understand their needs and then improvise their content as per these requirements.
After: Our writers work closely with clients in order to understand their needs and write content that meets those needs.
Before: We boast of writers who have great command over the language and can write for any given industry or sector.
After: Our writers have a great command of the language and can write for any industry.Power up those verbs
Verbs are action words. A powerful verb conveys feelings and stimulates the imagination. The best way to transform hollow verbs such as go, walk, come, run, think, know and get is to use a Thesaurus or dictionary of synonyms. You can even use the synonym finder in Microsoft Word. For example, type the word “walk”, right click on it, and select Synonyms to see the alternatives: saunter, stroll, amble, march, stride, pace, hike and toddle.
Ditch the nominalisation
A nominalisation is a verb that has been turned into an abstract noun, for example, movement, excitement, and failure. Because they are intangible and cannot be seen, touched, heard or tasted, nominalisations are excellent for creating fluffy, abstract writing that sounds important but is meaningless, serving no more than to bewilder the reader. The only way to gain movement and meaning is to turn the nominalisation back into a verb or adjective and make it a process.
Before: My reaction to the report was a negative one.
After: I reacted negatively to the report.
Before: The girl has not had the benefit of representation by counsel.
After: Counsel has not represented the girl.
Then there is the double nominalisation, a favourite of politicians, business and academia. It sounds impressive but is so open to interpretation that it overloads and numbs the mind. For example:
- Learning disability (who is not learning? how are they disabled?)
- Knowledge management (who knows what about what and how is it managed and by whom?)
- Informational relations (who is informing whom? who is relating?)
To conclude
Using these techniques will de-clutter your writing, add interest, and remove ambiguities.
References
EnglishClub.com
Painless Writing by Jeffrey Strausser
