a.
Structure: Moves from the kid-life immersion
experience writing style to a writing style that references Colin as a child,
to an analysis section where Susan begins to put meaning with the way Colin
lives his life, and then moves to a research based section where her research
on various subjects like Street Fight II inform her points of meaning, but then
she goes back to the kid-style writing again to show that kids can’t hold onto
this deep stuff for too long.
b.
Voice: Mixes the voice between her own and Colin’s.
There are key places (the opening parahraph) that are written from his voice,
then there are analysis pieces and more reflective sections that Susan writes
in her own voice, which is a voice of contemplative amusement—looking at his
life quizzically.
c.
Telling: A lot of the telling she did was about
statistics for boys, games, etc. It was clearly not image-provoking, but it was
interesting and held my attention.
d.
Style: Some of the story seems to be written
like a research paper on children and others like a personal essay and others
like a journalism piece. The parts where she reports on what the teacher and
the students do and includes interviews with the kids and their opinions on
matters are like journalism. Whereas the parts where she uses data and
knowledge that she wouldn’t know otherwise is clearly research based and even
has a thesis aura to it sometimes. And then the parts where includes herself in
the story seems like personal essay.
e.
I will take from this the skill of writing from
a different voice. I’ve never tried that before, and now I think it might be
cool to write from my Dad’s voice on a short part of my long piece.
f.
Qs: Why the reference to sex in the first
paragraph? That was just bizarre to me. I didn’t want to think about a grown
woman and a child having sex, even if she was negating the idea. Such a weird
part of the intro. And did she use specific phrases from Colin’s repertoire to
master coining his voice?
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