Teacher Says

Don’t write about what you are going to write about; just write about it! You write as if you are going to tell a story, but you never tell it. Why did you go to D.C.? What did you do there? How was it such a powerful experience? Tell about the friends you made. Allow your readers to feel the same feelings you felt by describing things in detail. Names help; faces do, too. Character traits make names and faces come to life; anecdotes make characters believable. You very briefly describe your experiences in paragraph 2, but you don’t devote much time to it for your readers to buy that it was such a profound experience. Since you only describe it vaguely, it seems like it was no big deal.

Why is that opening paragraph there? What purpose does it serve? What if you just started with the dialogue? Make it clearer that you left the bathroom and went into the store. More sensory descriptions like you’ve written elsewhere would help chart that journey. Since it’s the very next sentence, it’s not clear to your readers how far away from the bathroom you walked. But it ends up to be an important detail to know. When you include quotations, you need to discuss why. Quotations can’t do that work for you and it’s rarely obvious to your readers why you bothered to include that specific quotation. Explain how it supports your point.