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Review #3583333
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by A Guest Visitor
Review of Food for Thought  
Review by Mandarine
Rated: E | (3.5)
Access:  Public | Hide Review (?)
Hi Marti

After reading your story I had a few comments to offer. I hope you find them useful. They are just my personal ideas, suggestions and reflections on your piece.

PERSONAL IMPRESSION:

I thought this was a very interesting piece. The way it ended tied it up nicely and brought the reader back to the thesis of the story. It's a very focused look at life in the country and I'm sure a lot of people would relate to it because I think few people live like that. It's also proves that humans adapt to everything, even things we think we would simple die die if we had to do. This is the true strength of a human being. Unfortunately we are not all aware of it!

SUGGESTIONS:

- I think you should space your paragraphs so its more visually appealing to read. People can be put off by a chunk of text.

- Your first sentence was long and awkward, and it also didn't fit with the rest of the piece. I think you should first mention that you are at work and looking out the window, then you can say how the leaves and the colors refreshed your memory. The sentence needs to be cut down.

- The missing punctuation during conversations made it really confusing to read. It was hard to know when someone stopped talking and when the narration started. Spacing out your paragraphs would also help with this.

EDITING SUGGESTIONS:

> ill prepared - ill-prepared

>middle class [ , ] much “citified” culture

> Citified, - a semicolon might work better here.

>two hole - two-hole

> mother in law - mother-in-law

>“OH my God! What have I gotten myself into? - The quotation mark should be removed. OH should be Oh.

>spend endless hours preparing and putting into jars. - Without going into details, you should briefly mention what is it you are preparing and putting into jars. It wasn't clear and not everyone knows what canning means.

> When one person is talking, you just need one set of quotation marks to nestle the speech in between. Several times you split up the words of one person.

Example:

“It is better and besides I like to see the finished product at the end of the summer.” “My pantry looks so nice with all the shining jars looking back at me.”

Those two sentences followed each other, so the quotations between "summer" and "My pantry" should not be there.

>Mother-in-Law - Doesn't need to be capitalized.

>and [ that ] she didn’t have to work so hard.

> summer, my beloved Mother-in-law - My beloved etc should be the beginning of a new sentence.

> Finally, I think you should consider shortening the last few sentence. They were long and contained some repetition that made them hard to understand and read.

Thank you so much for this sweet story.

   *CheckG* You responded to this review 09/14/2011 @ 8:27pm EDT
Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/my_feedback/action/view/id/3583333