Responses to Pieces (Week 10)

Response to Andrea’s “Lisa Desmonde Profile”

I liked how you opened the piece with the redundancy of the homes and then showed how Lisa’s home was different. But then I wanted to know more of why she was different and what those things meant to her? Was she the only Obama follower in the neighborhood? What does the reef represent? Why doesn’t she smoke/want smokers?

Although the structure of the quotes got confusing sometimes, I liked the voice that they had. They definitely helped to develop her character. The quotes were interesting and tied the piece together. But along with this, I think that descriptions of Lisa and her daughter both would be helpful in imagining the scene.

Something in general to work on is transitions. Some paragraphs made large jumps (paragraph two talks about her daughter in the last sentence, then jumps to a quote by Lisa at the beginning of paragraph 3), so reworking those would make it flow better.

Overall, I was a little bit confused about the final message. Was it about Lisa’s struggles in life—MS, welfare, etc? Problems with education? I see where it’s going though and I can really tell that you asked the right questions and got personal with your subject.

Response to Simona’s “A Course in Michigan’s Migrant Housing”

This was a really interesting piece—I never even realized how much of a problem this is all over Michigan. I liked your break-up of explanation, statistics, and quotes. One thing though, is that I don’t see some of the quotes as crucial to the piece. For example, if you want to use the dialogue between Megan and Elizabeth at the beginning, then I feel like they need to be fleshed out as characters a little bit more, instead of us just seeing them speak two lines and then exit the rest of the piece. Maybe even their opinions on the class or why they are taking it or how it’s affected them would help.

I would also like to see more descriptions. How did the houses look that you actually did go into? I also don’t know how I feel about the “I” character. I think that the article could hold its own without a self-character. You could still describe the surroundings and then go even more in depth with what others feel and see—such as Megan, Elizabeth, or the workers for the program.

Response to Steven’s “Sunday Morning”

I enjoyed your descriptions in your piece—you paid close attention to all the details and that is what makes this piece interesting. But almost all of it is description until the end, so I think other voices and more interactions are necessary. There are the voices of a few characters at the end but they come so long into the piece that they are never developed. It would be nice to know who they are and what they look like earlier. Maybe this happened because it was written in semi-chronological order, like a story, but I think it would be better to break the descriptions up so we see more conflict from the start.

I liked your narrator voice in it because it made it seem like you were trying to immerse yourself in the church even though you were clearly standing out. Something that would be helpful is establishing what certain religious terms are. I know, for me, it was hard to follow all of the religious descriptions and narration because I am not religious so it took me longer to establish what scenes were. This also made the piece interesting though—I learned some new things and could tell you were also thrown into a completely new atmosphere.