Advanced Essay Writing, Spring 2013

“A professional student?  We had one of you in the family before,” she said, her piercing blue eyes fading quickly from the present, back to somewhere less cloudy.

I smiled as the brogue slipped off of her tongue and brought me back to the cloudy skies and cobblestoned streets she was remembering from her childhood.  The scent of her lavender hand lotion rises into the air as she grips her cup of English tea, hands shaking ever so slightly.  She returns my smile.

“Yes Grandma, I know,” I reply, swallowing back tears and turning away.

—

Just a few years earlier, we had walked those streets together, snapping pictures of my younger brother in front of statues of famous soccer figures and popping into the occasional pub for a mid-afternoon shandy.  Our apartment for the week provided views of bright red double-decker buses flying down the main street on the wrong side of the line; further outside, the early morning fog rose over the River Mersey, leaving what lay beyond the shoreline a complete mystery.

This was the first time it happened.

“Where are we?” she asked, looking around with genuine concern and confusion.

 

This is an excerpt from my second essay.  One major break that I used in this passage is the section break, indicated with the double dashed line.  This break makes it clear that there is a change in both time and place, with the first sentence of the second section leading the reader to recognize that this is a flashback section and that I am writing the rest of the essay in the present tense.

A second strategy that I used in the second section was a one sentence paragraph: “This was the first time it happened”.  This is different from the single paragraph quotes because it is not simply dialogue, but a clear statement.  It is a phrase that is important for the reader to recognize and a style that I plan on repeating throughout the rest of the piece.