Purple prose examples

[igenlode]

More rewrites, in response to some rather uninspired 'how to improve your purple prose' examples.

Original 'bad' (and pretty implausible) example:
He moved slowly, at length, and carefully on tip toes through the room with an entirely unnecessary gaze trained on the purple, wooden front door.

Suggested 'improved' version, which was then accused of being boring:
He moved carefully through the room, training his gaze on the door.

My attempt for that one:
He moved cautiously through the room, keeping a wary eye on the front door.

Second 'bad' example (which I can actually imagine appearing quite inoffensively in the middle of one of those first-person teenage books with a geeky narrator):
The proliferation of thoughts in my mind was causing me to experience brain freeze in the middle of science class.

Suggested 'improved' (and rather didactic) version:
My mind was crammed with too many thoughts, which is why I had a brain freeze moment in the middle of science class.

My attempt at making it more 'active':
My mind was buzzing as one possibility after another tumbled in and was rejected, and stuck there in the middle of science class I couldn't seem to get out a single coherent thought.

Comments

[igenlode]

Saying "he moved at length through the room" in the first example doesn't even make sense :-(
(I mean, you could just about say "At length, he moved carefully through the room" in the sense of "eventually, after a long time", but even so it would be hard to come up with an example where that phrasing would sound natural -- and I don't think that was the sense intended here.)
The whole business of 'training his gaze', i.e. staring carefully and fixedly at something, doesn't make much sense either. If his gaze is trained on the front door all the time he would probably be tripping over everything in the room ;-P

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Rewrites are under the tag edits -- created so that I could find them myself ;-)

And I've spent the evening caught up in scrolling through my blog myself, having now got back to 2019 ;-p
Anything rather than attempt to rewrite that wretched chapter...

[(Anonymous)]

"He moved at length" is not idiomatic, you say...?
It would have been nice to reply now with "Yeah, I thought that didn't sound quite right." But the truth is I can never spot these things.

[igenlode]

The only way I can usually spot something wrong in a foreign language is if it actively interferes with my comprehension (i.e. someone writes the equivalent of 'loose' for 'lose', and it's a word that is so obsolete or obscure, or simply inappropriate, that I get completely confused because I don't have the 'auto-correct' ability of a native speaker...)