Teacher Says

It takes you 3 paragraphs just to get in the water. And at paragraph 3, I’m still wondering where you are going with this story. Without any transition, your readers have no idea why you are bringing up Oedipus the King. Tons of run-on sentences make this read like a first draft. Also, similar sentence patters make your story quickly lose its excitement. Every error you make forces your readers to question whether or not you know what you’re writing about.

Consider what details you need in order to tell your story. I’m thinking you could have told this story in a different way, focusing on details that would let your readers experience your fear and confusion along with you.

It seems like you mean to imply that accidents lead to more awareness. Your “everyone has their faults” paragraph suggest that, but you never develop that idea enough to prove that point. Even in your discussion of Oed, you just gloss over that idea, assuming that your readers believe or even understand you. It seems a big mistake to make that assumption. The way you narrate your events makes it seem like it wasn’t a big deal. You cut yourself, but you washed it off and made it through your day just fine. You don’t emphasize anything you learned or how lucky you are that it wasn’t worse or even how bad the cut actually was. Because of that, the reader is left wondering why this was an even worth reading about.

Carolyn comes into the story so late, it’s hard to see that discussion as part of the same story. It looks like an add on, extra information that isn’t very necessary. Is this a story about washing dishes and being careless with electronics or your ideas about friendship? I suppose there’s a way for it to be both, but not how you’ve written it here. Stay focused, from beginning to end, on proving some point. Here it’s an observation about life that you’ll use your experience and Oed to prove true. There are good reflections here, but without focus, your readers are never sure of exactly what you want to say.

There are a lot of problems here suggesting that you’re not clear on period, comma, or apostrophe use. That makes for a sloppy paper that gets confusing as sentences run together (see top of page 3), thoughts end before they are completed, and housing is confused (“Julie house” and “Elijah house” instead of “Julie’s house” and “Elijah’s house”). You plant some good references to Oed, it’s just hard for your readers to take you seriously when this reads like a first draft.