The borrowed name

Source: an original fiction extract.

“At the hotel reception, the clerk called him Mr Harris. Leo had borrowed his colleague's booking because the conference organisers had failed to change it in time. He explained this once, quietly, while a queue formed behind him. The clerk smiled, handed him a key and called him Mr Harris again. By dinner, three people had asked him about a successful project he had never worked on. He discovered that nodding took less effort than correcting them.

The dining room glittered with professional confidence. Glasses rang against one another in small, bright agreements. Name badges flashed on dark jackets like polished credentials, and every table seemed to contain someone leaning forward to be recognised. Leo's borrowed badge lay cool against his shirt. The printed letters were neat and certain; beneath them, his own answers grew shorter and less sure.

A woman from a funding organisation sat beside him and said she had admired his presentation the previous year. Leo said it had been a team effort. This was true of most presentations, he thought. She asked whether he would speak briefly at the morning session. He looked for a way to refuse without explaining why. Across the room, a waiter dropped a spoon. Everyone glanced towards the sound, then returned to their conversations. Leo wished the interruption had lasted longer.

In his room, he took off the badge and placed it beside the key. He could email the organiser. He could leave before breakfast. He opened the message from his colleague, who had written: Hope the booking worked. Sorry about the muddle. Leo began a reply saying there had been no problem. Then he deleted it and wrote to the organiser instead. He used his full name in the first sentence.

At breakfast, the woman from the funding organisation approached his table. He stood up too quickly. She said the organiser had explained, and there was an uncomfortable pause in which Leo could hear the coffee machine cleaning itself. Then she asked what he actually worked on. He began with a smaller project, one without awards, and found that he could answer her questions in complete sentences.”

Refer only to the second paragraph. Analyse how the writer uses language to present the pressure to appear successful at the conference. Support your ideas with quotations from that paragraph. You could consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.