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Vienna 1971—A Student Journal
A year of music, study, travel, sightseeing & friends.

Day 32 — Amusement at Prater
03-September-1971 (Fri.)

TRANSCRIPT

Went to Prater amusement park. Had a lot of fun. Went on one scary ride—got dizzy. Tried to win prize for Anjali—didn’t. Played her in ping-pong—she was pretty good. The only thing I really did much better than her—was to eat.


REFLECTIONS

Prater. I remember being at Prater, a large amusement park on the outskirts of Vienna, near the Danube river. I remember that in 1971 it had a large ferris wheel as one of the distinctive features of the park. It was crowded. As usual, I get a bit motion sick on any ride that tends to put me in unnatural positions that God never meant us to be in. Certainly the amusement park rides of those days were tame compared to the insane rides and roller coasters that are in modern amusement parks. I should have some pictures of Prater soon, I hope. A second “as usual” is that I never can win anything (those stuffed animals) when playing those carnival games.

Spending the last few days with Anjali seems to be the highlight of my social life during this month. A lot of fun. I was not very good at ping pong, ever. I am very good at eating. I still continue that eating tradition today as I constantly eat too many sweets and fast food as I battle my bulge.

Grammar notes—some notes on my journal writing style.

I did want to comment again on the style of my writing in this journal. This particular entry used a lot of dashes.

Help me—Grammar Girl. Notice my overuse of the emdash —. In this journal, I use this emdash a lot for emphasis and to indicate hesitation—to highlight and bring emphasis to an important point. Sort of like stream-of-consciousness thinking. Actually, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t always use it correctly. At times like this we can solicit the help of a great grammar podcast, Grammar Girl. Here are her notes on the uses of dashes.

[You can subscribe to Grammar Girl’s podcast—Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing—in the podcast section of the iTunes Music store or at her website.

Here is what Answers.com says regarding the emdash.

“A symbol — used in writing and printing to indicate a break in thought or sentence structure, to introduce a phrase added for emphasis, definition, or explanation, or to separate two clauses.”

Thanks Answer.com. I use Answer.com a lot to answer my questions. It works very nicely, generally giving you short and quick answers instead of wading through a ton of Google search results.

Another feature of my writing is not always writing in complete sentences. My intent—to summarize, use key words or short, chunky phrases—was to write for myself. I think that is typical of writing informally in journals that you think will never be read by anyone.

Web 2.0 writing style. Today’s writing styles on Web 2.0 social-networking sites is quite amazing. Sometimes I can’t even understand anything. You young folks will have to train me or send me a manual. OMG LOL

[Transcription. The only thing I correct in the transcript as I type, are the obvious spelling typos. Actually, Microsoft Word is auto-correcting much of the spelling as I type. I may have left some misspellings on the first few entries, thinking that I would be “pure” to the journal.]

Ok, see you tomorrow.

John

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Tags: Prater, Anjali, sightseeing, Grammar Girl, grammar, writing, answers.com, qdnow.com