The phrase "an impression of something" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when describing a perception or feeling about a particular subject or object.
Example: "After visiting the art gallery, I left with an impression of something truly unique and inspiring."
Alternatives: "a sense of something" or "a feeling about something".
But why, then, is there an impression of something unsettled and unsettling here, as if something crucial were missing?
And yet there was nothing old-clothesy about what he did, because the traces of the past were wiped away, as if by a broom, so that you were left with an impression of something new.
We can spend a lot of time working out what it means, and how and why all of this might go together, but that isn't the same as experiencing a work of art that tells you something, or makes you feel something, or leaves you with an impression of something beautiful in the world.
Having said that, if you can think of a really striking statement that creates an impression of something special, I concede that they can be compelling.
Will it be more false solutions intended to create an impression of doing something while really just ensuring more profitable business opportunities for the 1percentt?
But that's often the way advertising works best, by giving a 'general impression' of something.
I am not sure this counts as a substantial inaccuracy but an after-dinner speech does gives the impression of something prepared beforehand, that was more thoughtful and considered, rather than an off-the-cuff joke now publicly regretted by Prof Hunt as being thoughtless.
The stronger the impression of something happening to a particular person in a particular place at a particular time, the greater the reader's sense of recognition.
A wall-eyed study of a weekend convention for fiercely competitive chess programmers in the early 1980s, it's shot on archaic black-and-white video stock – intended, along with its eerily undetectable storytelling perspective – to give it the impression of something found festering in an archive.
Once the main battle starts, culminating in a massive siege of Jerusalem with zillions of pixellated soldiers massing on a computer-generated plain, then at least we get the impression of something happening, partly reversing the sclerosis of boredom that has been creeping into the movie from the opening credits.
In this board of overseers, authors have the disadvantage of an intimate and proprietorial acquaintance with the text, while the marketing analysts have only a record of previous flops and successes to go by, and no way of producing that impression of something new which is one ingredient of a commercial success in the creative arts.
