My Life As A Reader: Revised Using the Lanham Method
In this revised excerpt of earlier writing, I worked on untangling the sentences and restructuring them to fit a who-did-what pattern to the best of my ability at this point, without altering the original message. I’ve become so set in my writing style that this presented a challenge for me.
As a child, I always enjoyed reading. Living in a rural corner of my school district, I didn’t have the involved social atmosphere that most of my classmates grew up in. I had no neighbors or kids my own age nearby. I primarily interacted with other kids during the school day. I spent many afternoons and evenings with the company I found through reading.
My favorite books promised adventure, interactions with nature, encounters with savages, or anything to feed my imagination as to what might lurk in the forests surrounding my home. My aunt, a middle school English teacher, funded my love for reading by sending me book store gift cards every Christmas and birthday. The first book I bought was Hatchet by Gary Paulson. As a third grader, the turn of each page found me facing each new obstacle right along with the character. I identified with the wilderness as a backdrop for stories because the forest was part of my own identity, so I sought more books with similar settings. Next, I read My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. I soon sought my own solitude in tree forts, at least until the sun went down.
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Lukas,
ReplyDeleteIt is always difficult to use active voice when writing in past tense. Given that, you've done well to incorporate it in where possible, for instance in your second sentence ("living in a...").
You seem to have avoided many of the problems discussed by Lanham. The only issue that I feel could use some reworking is your reliance on prepositional phrases. The most notable culprit of a sentence being "I identified with the wilderness..."
A solid piece overall and with practice I'm sure we'll all be able to incorporate the pieces of the Lanham method that we find best fit our own individual writing styles.
-David