… attorney (SOS post here), let’s sample some good writing. Here the author must make repeated reference to the scads of recently-built zillionaires’ apartments in New York City, half of which sit empty.
Yes, half.
Today, nearly half of the Manhattan luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold …
(To be sure, even when they are sold, they’re usually – some of them always – empty. They’re someone’s seventh home; they’re strictly about money laundering; they’re investments. So that postmodern simulacral vibe hums on… But put that aside. That’s only about the hollowing out of a great city’s culture.)
Here’s America’s premier city, with a terrible homeless problem and a just as terrible lack of middle class housing, and the place bursts with high-end residential nothingness. Let’s look at how a good writer finds different ways to refer to his subject throughout his essay.
He calls these typically high and very narrow buildings
colossal stalagmites
empty sky palaces
Manhattan’s glassy spires
Dude has actually gone to the trouble to look at stalagmites, which do in fact resemble quite eerily NYC’s clinic of bloodless needles. Empty sky palaces, with its assonance on the p and y, is positively poetic; and Manhattan’s glassy spires, while the least exciting of the three, offers nice assonance on the a‘s (Manhattan, glassy).