Oct 06 2008
Concrete Details Assignment
Write a 500-word description of an event (or object) with at least 25 concrete details and at least 2 abstractions.
That will get you the 10 points for “good.”
To get the 15 points for “great,” have several spots where it’s “thick” with concrete details.
Example (abstractions in bold, concrete details underlined):
Note that the first half only has a few concretes scattered here and there (good) while the second half has a lot more concretes per idea (great…or getting there).
Eight years old. I had waited for this moment all my life. Eight. I was a big boy now. At last! Now my parents would let me watch the Simpsons. Now my parents would let me stay up past 7 p.m. Now maybe I could decide whether or not to eat my vegetables, pick my own friends, and best of all, not have to wear underoos anymore.
“You’re unusually quiet,” my mother said as my friends filed in through the front door for my party. I didn’t answer. My eyes remained front and center. The cause of my reticence would appear soon enough. Soon I would begin the process of choosing my own friends by ejecting all those who had ever caused me pain.
I always hated that front door. Rather than being solid wood or metal, nearly the whole door was taken up by a huge sheet of glass. The glass had some frilly design etched in it, but what was the point? Anyone walking down the street – or especially stepping onto our front porch – could look right into our house. “Why not take down all the walls, mom?” I asked repeatedly inside my own head. “Why not just put up glass walls so everyone can watch us 24-7?”
Carla stepped inside and quickly found a spot to sit down on our old, floral-patterned couch. Carla and her dark brown pig tails. Carla and her big brown spying eyes. Carla had looked through or faux door last summer and seen me dancing in the living room. When word spread through the school that I was dancing by myself – if you don’t count the vacuum cleaner I was swinging back and forth in time to the Beach Boys song on the radio – the guys stopped picking me first for dodgeball and pomp. “Dancing King,” they called me.