Blog Post 2.2
Excerpt:
After fifty minutes of spacing out and worrying about this paper, the bell rang and I practically ran straight to my teacher. I wanted to understand why he didn’t like my essay. This one grade was already beginning to make me doubt my talent as a writer. In fact, I was heart-broken.
I was worried that maybe I wasn’t as good a writer as I always thought.
Was I only fooling myself?
***
We sat down to talk after class, and I was relieved to see that his human side was still there. The chalkboard was crammed with notes from that day’s class, and on his desk sat a battered copy of The Fountainhead, his sheet of notes and a messy pile of extra handouts. He gestured for me to hand him my paper and I relaxed a little, but I was still worried. He made space on his desk and then browsed through my essay as if to re-familiarize himself with it. These were his first words: “I could that tell you worked really hard on this. It’s definitely well-written, no punctuation or spelling errors, and that’s great. But, my concern is, when you’re describing humans, you’re not digging deep enough.”
I nodded and allowed him to continue, expecting this to be a one-way conversation. But to my surprise, he said: “Forget about this paper for a minute and tell me, in your own words, what you think it means to be a human being.”
In this example I actually included a section break and three paragraph breaks. The portion above the asterisks were originally one paragraph, and the portion beneath was also one long paragraph. But after playing around with paragraph and section breaks, I think I found something that works. The breaks are definitely effective because I feel like it changes the rhythm of the piece and how it’s read. I went for a section break between the end of my class and the meeting with my teacher, because it would tell the reader that I’m going into a new phase or a new direction.
The one line paragraphs that I made places a lot more emphasis on those simple sentences, and it reads better in my opinion. Readers now have a brief moment to ponder how I’m feeling before they get to the next event. And after I quoted my teacher at the beginning of the meeting, I made another paragraph break for a clear transition to my reaction. I think readers would be less inclined to rush through the paragraph if it’s structured this way.