Classmate Response 2, Week 8

In Response to David's Week 8 Freewrite:

You have an interesting concept here and I'm wondering where you fished this up from? I'm glad you love me so much or I'd be force to kill you to figure out where you stole this--I kid.  I do, though, love crazy old people. That aside, I also think you handled this relatively well. Not too heavy-handed, even tone. Nice.

That said, I think this piece starts at the second stanza. You might have weird, if not, somewhat interesting things to say about trains, but whether a train attacks somewhat has little to do with the rest of the work. That's why I think you can start with, "On a day..." and changing the attack in the second line to include and become "train attack" so that we know what the speaker is referring to and so that we as readers can draw our own conclusions as to whether trains attack. I will relent that because of some of the interesting points you make in the first stanza, you can incorporate a small amount into the rest of the piece, but there is a point where you reach overkill on an idea and that first stanza as a whole does it.

I love the informative style this piece takes in contrast to the concrete images, but I feel some of the sentences could be condensed. For instance, "on a day that was both sunny and windy, she heard the news from the radio before her family could call her, and the attack that she laughed about would later pester her into insomnia and wide-eyed she would stare at walls" can become, "on a day that was both sunny and windy, she heard the news from the radio, and the train attack she laughed about would pester her into wide-eyed insomnia." I'm also debating whether we even need to know what kind of day it was...

Did her family actually serve a purpose in this piece? You go on to mention the walls later so is it ok to condense this part? There is a lot of repetition. Go ahead and cut some away, that way, each line does not get bogged down in unnecessary information.

I'm wary of funeral pyres. I'm only half-convinced. Seems... archaic in a sense? and heavy. Perhaps that's just me.

I like the negative progression of certainty here. She heard about it, maybe she heard about it, it might not have even happened.

All in all, enjoyable. Just do some condensing. Hope this helps.