Mimic
“Imitate the writers you admire,” states Bill Vossler. Rather than mimicry, I've always thought of this as reverse engineering. If the beginning of an article is especially memorable, see how it can be adapted to serve your purposes. The same goes with an ending.
I devised the introduction for the Taoyuan City section of my Bradt guide after reading in an old Bangkok guidebook that modern-day visitors to Silom Road struggle to believe it used to be an area of rice fields and windmills. (Silom means “windmill.”) This is what I came up with:
It’s hard to picture Taoyuan as an orchard full of blossoming peach trees. Yet that’s how it looked two centuries ago, and that’s why this manufacturing center with almost 400,000 inhabitants has a name that strikes 21st-century visitors as perversely bucolic: táo (peach) yuán (garden)...
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