Katy Hambley 10W
Isolated
There she sat, her pale, tear-stained face gazing onto the dark street. The street was dead. Everyone was asleep, everyone that was, but her. She sat there blankly, and watched as gradually night turned to day and the street started to become more and more alive. The postman plodded along, chirpy as usual, and the kids from next door screeched and giggled as they chased each other down the street. Her life must go on, she knew she had to get over it, and move on. Yet still she sat there, the salty tears running down her cheeks.
Why did it have to happen to her? There were plenty of other people in the world, so why was it that she was the one person who it had to happen to, the one person who had to suffer?
She knew that she couldn’t stay cooped up in her room for the rest of her life, so after prolonged deliberation she came to the conclusion that her only option was to run away. She reached over to her desk, opened the drawer and pulled out her purse. She tipped its small contents onto the bed, and counted.
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Peer Reviews
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Quality of writing
The author has used good spelling throughout, and the piece has very few grammatical errors. One example of this is: ‘‘I won’t tell anyone.’ She desperately pleaded.’ Which should have been ‘‘I won’t tell anyone,’ she desperately pleaded’ – replacing the full stop with a comma. They have not used a large variety of punctuation – there were several opportunities in the plotline to add suspense by using an ellipsis, for example, I would have considered saying something along the lines of: ‘she hid, terrified, behind a bin, waiting for the murderer to find her...’ A more varied punctuation would allow the author to create suspense and subtly change the pace of sections of the story in order to emphasise emotions. I found the overall storyline quite hard to understand the first time round, which could be improved by adding small snippets of background information earlier on in the story in order to allow the reader to understand the character’s reposes to, for example, the policemen. This could also let the author increase the feeling of isolation by describing Natasha being alone at home, perhaps with no one to turn to in her time of need. Overall, the quality of written communication is ok, although a few minor improvements would make the story far more readable.
Level of analysis
The author has used several narrative devices, such as rhetorical questions and rule of three, as well as a variety of adjectives and adverbs, which helps to create an image in the reader’s mind. They have also used alternative verbs to create imagery – for example ‘he spat’ instead of ‘he said’, which makes the story more interesting to read. However, some important events could have been far more embellished with descriptions; for example ‘she came to the conclusion that her only option was to run away’ feels very matter-of-fact, when this key decision could have been better used to express the character’s sense of helplessness and isolation, in order to increase the reader’s emotional attachment to Natasha. I would perhaps have rephrased it as: ‘How could she stay there in fear, knowing he would only come and find her too? Her heart cried as she forced herself to leave her home to escape, alone in the world’. Although short sentences have been used to increase the pace of the action scenes, this technique is made less effective by the lack of many longer sentences throughout. I would have improved this by merging several sentences together, for example using connectives, which would also have the effect of allowing the whole story to flow better and let tension be more effectively created by variations in sentence structure. The author could also try to vary the viewpoint of descriptions – for example ‘This is strange’ could be replaced by ‘shock and surprise flitted across her pale face’, which would also build a better picture of the scene in the reader’s mind.
Response to question
The author was given the task of writing a piece of creative writing on the theme of isolation. Although the topic is touched upon in the opening paragraph, when the main character is crying alone in her room, the rest of the story feels far too fast-paced to create a sense of isolation, while Natasha dodges policemen and confronts her father’s murderer. Although the author appears to have begun the story on topic, they have quickly drifted away from the theme of isolation. Therefore, the author has not addressed the question very well.
