than is needed for the ten
students, but is it a white walled modern room with a
whiteboard? A nineteenth-century classroom with big drafty
windows and pitted chalkboard? Does Mr. Cranmer write his
name with the squeak of marker against whiteboard, or rasp
of chalk against a blackboard? Are the student desks
individual and ancient? Long desks with rows of chairs
tucked neatly in? When the students move restlessly at the
first sight of their syllabus, do their desks creak and
groan? Does Mr. Cranmer’s voice echo in the nearly empty
room? Or is he hard to hear and students must sit up close
to the front?
Take a look at “Mrs. Comfrey
Wins” in your Voices anthology, for an example of
using sensory detail to capture the stifling nature of Mrs.
Comfrey’s daughter’s home.
One more suggestion I have for you is to work some more on
your sentence structure. You’ve made good progress judging by the improvement
I see from the last assignment, but you might want to try reading your story
aloud to hear whether the sentences and dialogue flow as you mean them to. In a
story so short, each sentence should be as well-crafted as possible.
For
example, “I knew that he had to be more intelligent than to show off his
manly build.” This sentence does not make sense as it is written. Readers
get impatient when you throw in a sloppy sentence. It pulls them out of the
story. It is better to make two clear sentences than try to force two competing
images into one unclear sentence—“I knew he had to be intelligent by the
way he carried himself. His thin, frail body was held as proudly as if he were a
prime example of physical fitness.”
You’ve made a great start in fiction with “Mr. Cranmer’s
Syllabus.” Assignment #3 will offer you a change of pace. Since you’ve
decided that you’d like to work on a nonfiction family history, I think this
is a good time to try. I’m looking forward to reading about your father’s
family.
In addition to following the steps in Section 3 of Breaking into
Print and reading chapters 9–12 in On Writing Well, check out the
article in Voices, “Through a Glass, Painted,” for one idea on
how to approach your non-fiction topic.
