Greetings, Gold General Leila
It is my pleasure to review your personal essay "The last goodbye" as is entitled
to the highest ranking general in The Curse of the Green Witch Raffle Event
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NOTE: Please remember that the following comments and observations are only one person's opinion. Take what you can use but never be shy about discarding what you cannot. Most important of all, keep writing, improving, and contributing to our wonderful community!
OVERALL SENSE
This brief tribute to your beloved grandpa is touching and pulsing with real emotions. It must have been cathartic for you to have written it, an exorcising of demons swirling around in your mind concerning his sudden death. That is one of the great things about writing: it forces one to come to terms with a loss and organize thought-patterns and schemas surrounding the memories of the person, both good and bad. Overall, your instincts for what is important in this essay are on the right track. You speak of the accident, the return for his funeral, and the fact that it took a while for it to settle in for you. What the essay lacks -- and I will go into this more below -- are more details and an advanced narrative structure that will make your essay as interesting as possible to all readers who wish to know more about your wonderful grandfather (O avo or opa ? Because you don't describe where you were coming from -- Brazil? -- or where you went -- Germany? -- I had to use what I know about you and your clues about the seasons to guess which. More on this below.)
USING THE "FEATURE LEAD" APPROACH TO ESSAY-STRUCTURE
It may seem obvious that a personal essay would rely on chronological order to create the greatest effect. This is just not often true, however. A personal essay needs to begin at a point of maximum interest, to draw a reader into what is being retold. This is the same approach used in jounalistic "feature" stories. If I were writing a story about a musician who had been on top of the world with his music, nearly died from drug overdose, and then redeemed himself through meditation, I would not begin the story at the very beginning ("Bam Buggerson was born in ...") nor would I necessarily begin at the lowest point in his life ("The dose of heroin Bam Buggerson injected on January 11th, 2002 almost killed him"). Where I would start, probably, is where Bam was now, where in his life he had reached, because sometimes in biography we, as readers, should know the end first and then learn how the person got there. It may seem counterintuitive to begin a story at the end, but we should always be looking for structures that can tell the story in the best way possible, and we should never restrict ourselves by a blind devotion to a chronological ordering of events. Never do I want you to think that the death of your grandfather is not interesting or worthy of being told, but as an essayist, you have to ask yourself what story you're telling. From what I just read, you are not telling your grandpa's story, you are telling how his death affected you. Suggestions for opening sequences would include the funeral or a discussion of the fact that your relatives were strangers to you. His actual death and the details are crucial, but should be in the middle not the beginning or end. Here is an interesting exercise that one of my university professors taught me. When you have finished the first draft of a personal essay, take the last couple sentences you wrote and put them at the beginning and see what happens. I am going to do that now, with your last two sentences:
"For a long time, whenever I visited my grandma, someone was missing. He will always be missing."
Now, what did that do for us? I think we found your opening sentence, actually. I don't like the combination of the two at the beginning, but I love the first one as an opener. "For a long time, whenever I visited my grandma, someone was missing" is a stellar opening sentence. Concise, poignant, chock-full of information for the reader ... it creates instant tension and questions (who is missing? why?). All writers want to finish strong, and they often come up with their strongest statements and imagery at the end, after they have organized the events in their mind while writing. Unfortunately, many excellent endings are never read because the writer didn't use an equally strong opening.
DETAILS MAKE YOUR ESSAY UNIQUE
Your essay has some excellent general statements, almost as if you are setting this out as template for what you want to say. What we need for the most effective essay is more details -- specific imagery, anecdotes, impressions, snatches of conversation. By doing this, you can also fix the most glaring problem with your essay, which is its length. By restructuring and adding in more details, you can lengthen your tribute to your grandfather's death to a piece worthy of its place in your life. I want to point you to two very good personal essays by 🌷 Carol St.Ann 🌷 . The first, "A Madison County Event" , describes losing a dear friend. In "A Fish Story" , she describes when her husband tried to teach her how to fish. The details revealed in these two essays are what is most memorable for me. That personal touch -- whether it is with ironic humor and charming modesty as Carol uses or with subtle symbolism and tear-jerking poignancy -- is what makes an essay outstanding and memorable for a reader.
GRAMMAR/SPELLING/SYNTAX:
There were a few things I saw concerning syntax, totally understandable for an author who speaks English as a second (third?) language. Here is what I found:
"'Head wound[s] bleeds a lot. People get worried. That's all.'"
"The [R]eality lost its substance."
"I was watching a movie about a girl who just had [just] lost her grandpa."
"I half[-]expected to find my grandpa at his home."
"I have no recollection of packing, getting into the car, traveling, but I must have done that, [for] I could not just appear 400 km (248 miles) away." There needs to be a coordinating conjuction to avoid this becoming a run-on sentence.
"Our places in the car haven't changed; they are [have been] the same for more than three decades."
"...thus, even my [closest] relatives but the closest were strangers for [to] me."
"We had moved from a land where the day[-]length changed little ..."
"I couldn't see my own face, but I must have been starring [staring] wide-eyed at those strangers coming and going."
AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT
As I spoke a bit about opening structure, I also want to speak about paragraph structure. Consider making your paragraphs shorter and breaking them up in more logical places. Quotes and their surrounding descriptions might better be left isolated in their own graphs.
"...400 km (248 miles)..." I put this in this section because I am not sure what international style is concerning writing out numerals in essays. If I were writing this, I would use "four hundred kilometers (248 miles)" according to literary style. This is just a suggestion. You might look up the rules according to which publication style you wish to use.
As I mentioned before, you never give specifics as to which areas of Earth you are leaving and returning to. You attach a lot of symbolism to the fact that you are a stranger in the land of your grandfather. We as readers would like to know which places you describe that have such different seasonal weather patterns.
"The pale serene face could have been made of wax." I was not sure whose face you were describing. I realized after a bit that it was a description of your grandfather's face, but it wasn't immediately clear to me. For some reason, I was thinking it was your face.
Consider capitalizing all the words in your title unless you have a specific reason not to. Poetic license is often taken in this style-mandate, but I cannot decipher the reason you have not in this instance.
FAVORITE LINE(S)
"Strangers they were to me, both the people and the land."
This is an excellent sentence. I like how you have inverted the direct object and the subject. Very effective!
"The trip, the meals, the place where we slept, I can't remember."
I like the structure of this sentence as well! The inversion just sounds right, as does the way you tick off the details of the things you can't remember.
Thanks for your community spirit, General Leila!
Regards,
PatrickB
Creator of The Art of Criticism,
co-founder of Passionate Mindscapes,
and proud member of Simply Positive, Rainbow Writers, I.N.K.E.D,
The Boiler Room, Rising Stars, The Poetry Contest Corner, and Showering Acts of Joy.
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