blog post one letter, imnprovement of essay

This essay is a great improvement from your past essay! You have done a good job using your sensory details and have demonstrated a better understanding for Jenna’s “show versus tell” practice of writing. Your use of dialogue is also very strong in your essay, and serves as a nice foundation for the scenes you are trying to describe. Keep up the good work!
However, there are a few minor things that I found in the essay that I feel you can improve upon. A couple of times I noticed that when you were describing something you sometimes used words like “pretty” or “very”. Although these words aren’t bad, they just seem inconsistent with the rest of your writing, especially with some of your better descriptions. I would suggest focusing on these “weak” words, if you will, in order to strengthen these descriptions, and to ultimately strengthen your voice,
Also another thing would be to include research. I know you story isn’t yet fully developed, (as mine is too), but its something we have to figure out how to cleverly include. But your social issue, poverty I assume, wouldn’t be all that difficult to find sources for, so you don’t have to worry about it too much. Just something to bear in mind
Good luck with the rest of your writing, and I look forward to reading the rest of your paper!

“In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends”
“Why didn’t anybody tell us?” Lujan’s mom asked from the podium on the stage of the funeral home, her voice barely discernable and unstable from the trembles of anguish and devastation. She stood there glaring at the crowd—as a judge looks down from the bench at a convicted killer—listening to the somber murmur of sniffles and gentle weeping that hovered like a dense fog, above the hanging heads of people who couldn’t bear to look her in the face. “This didn’t have to happen” she continued pointing to the casket, her red eyes still fixated spitefully at them. “This didn’t have to hap--.” She repeated, this time rushing of the stage, unable to finish, and unable to confront the silent, weeping crowd. The people who were watching her, watched her walking hurriedly across the first row of chairs, striding faster and faster until reaching her seat, where she collapsed into herself, and exalted an abrupt wail that decrescendoed into a wheezing sob. And aside from these weeps, the room fell silent again in anticipation for the next person to trudge up to the podium and grieve to the crowd. But no one else went up, and anticipation grew into awkwardness. And the funeral director looked at the crowd intently and anxiously until finally deciding to take the stage for prayer. Then in a soothing, deep voice, he began; “Dear Lord in Heaven, Let us bow heads together in grievance of the death of Dylan Lujan…”
After the service, everyone stood outside in front of the funeral home, and formed into about ten circles of about ten people each. Outside, the overcast sky retained the same gloom that the sniffling murmurs held inside the funeral home and some people joked that “God was weeping too”. I didn’t laugh, because I knew it was monsoon season, and storms had been occurring all that week. And after about ten minutes of forced conversation, the sky exploded abruptly—warning everything on Earth about the oncoming storm—with the type of thunder that seems to resonate with a low rumble long after the initial strike. And at the resounding growl, everyone looked at the sky, taking heed of the warning and smelling in the redolent of creosote, then huddled together underneath the cramped shelter of the funeral’s home front patio. Then silence ensued and the people watched blankly as the rain fell from a timid trickle, to an opague color of violent downpour.
I was looking at everyone else that was gathered under the overhang, anticipating at least a gentle murmur of conversation; but it was mute, deafening and tense, as though the muteness was a tangible substance that was causing my nervous twitches to start up. Then as my focus was making its way to the back of the crowd, I looked through the window of the funeral home and saw Lujan’s mom inside with her husband, talking with an elderly couple. Her hair was pulled back into a tight, conservative bun, and she was wearing a well ironed solid black dress, which accentuated the sad despondence amongst her soft facial features. And as I watched this lady, I was overcome with guilt. “Why didn’t we tell her?” I thought, “We all should have,” If she would have known, maybe her son wouldn’t have died writhing on his bedroom floor with his eyes rolled back into his head, panicking, half-consciously, desperately. And maybe if we had told her, she wouldn’t have walked into his room in the morning—checking on him because he never got up to get breakfast, and finding his body, lifeless and forlorn, curled up painfully on his stained gray carpet. “But She should have known. How could she not have?” I thought. The burn marks on his hands, his constant running nose, his constant droned expression, and dropping out of school (ehow): it seems so obvious what he was doing.
“Kyle, remember that fight a couple months ago where that kid got jumped?” my friend Andrew asked quietly, and interrupting my focus on Lujan’s mom.
“Huh? Oh, yeah.” I responded, startled, then taking the deep breath that people take when transitioning from profound personal thought to social interaction. “Why?”
“That’s him, isn’t it?”
I squinted my eyes to where he was pointing and saw a kid with a neck brace on. “I’m not sure” I answer, trying bring myself back to that day, trying to remember if I saw that kid’s face. But I never did. I was standing across campus when I saw everyone in the court yard coalesce in a fury around a violent commotion. I remember standing back on my tip-toes trying to see over the crowds’ heads, but they wouldn’t move. They wouldn’t do anything—like a herd of moose watches their brother get mutilated by wolves as he thrashes and writhes his body in a last effort to survive—idle, indifferent, and unable to recognize the lethality of their silence and inaction. But I never saw his face, and after the paramedics came and lifted the kid onto a gurny, I was in class, straining to catch a snippet of hushed conversation of what had happened. (not done yet)