Like, I’m almost speechless reflecting on what a great experience my internship turned out to be, really really positive, seeing as how I’d been kind of apprehensive about it, pretty concerned actually, because what had happened was, for some reason or other, who knows why, but over the years, yeah, I’d slipped into this uncool habit of writing these incredibly long sentences, and I’m talking here about sentences that would go on and on and on, all the way to the bottom of the page, then onto the next page, then all the way down to the bottom of that page as well, real syntactic tsunamis, a sort of wordsmithing on steroids, a sicko case of words, words and yet more words, welling up from some dark abyss within, I mean OMG, there’d be all these words pouring out onto the screen in front of me, unplugged, unzipped, unstoppable, tap, tap, a lexical avalanche, tap, tap, and some of them, tap, tap, some of those babies, boy were they big – Godzillas, Frankensteins, real monsters they were – words like propinquity and punctilious and pullulate and prestidigitation, so scary, they scared even me, and I was the one, hell, I WAS THE ONE WRITING THEM, but once I got going I couldn’t stop – no way – so basically, basically I’d be in this state of self-terrorisation, I’d be right into it, I’d be spooking myself silly with all these mega-long, multisyllabic words, and even though I wanted to I just couldn’t turn off the tap – hey, that was a pun – I couldn’t stop tap, tap, tapping away at the keyboard, and all the time I’m getting more and more worried, yeah, because I’m thinking (even while I’m tapping), I’m thinking how am I going to go as an intern trying to write news stories when the standard news story sentence, like, is only about 20 to 30 words long – true, sometimes it’s less than 20 words, though hardly ever less than 10, and true again, sometimes it’s more than 30; a sentence over 40 words, while not rare, is pretty uncommon, more uncommon in a tabloid than a broadsheet, why this should be so, the tantalizing mystery of it, having been studied ad nauseam, ad nauseam, ad nauseam (hey, another pun there, or maybe it’s just a play on words) – and not only that, in news stories big words are a real no-no, totally verboten, so I was getting more and more uptight on two fronts, since I had this double addiction, on the one hand to really long sentences, and if that wasn’t bad enough every now and then these long scary words would pop into my prose out of absolutely nowhere, words like uxoricide and thaumaturge and circumvallation and bandersnatch, and there seemed to be nothing I could do about it – the enormous words, the super-enormous sentences – but the thing is, once you’re in a newsroom and everyone around you is using short sentences and short words and the stories they’re writing are all pretty short, usually only about 10 or 12 pars, and you’re sitting there trying to write some article, and you’re getting more and more on edge, because there’s a 3pm deadline, and you know if you miss another deadline this time the embarrassment, the shame, it’ll probably kill you, finish you right off, and once it hits you that if you want to survive (and, like, who doesn’t want to survive?), if you want to survive you’re going to have to prune and trim and cut back and keep it short, short, short, otherwise at the end of your internship you’re going to have a portfolio with absolutely nothing in it, zip, a great big blank, well, what happens is you learn pretty quick, oh yeah, and instead of having a bad experience and not getting a single byline and winning the title “Dud Intern of the Year”, you end up with a portfolio absolutely stuffed with stories, and your internship turns out to be, like, one of the greatest things that’s ever happened to you, maybe even, yeah, maybe even the greatest.