6 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2020
  2. brevitymag.com brevitymag.com
    Intro to Creative Writing | Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
    6
    1. Person101 25 Aug 2020
      Stevens scowls and shakes his head, stuffs his hands in his pockets, and mutters something under his breath about the “catastrophe of modernism” before turning toward the chalkboard. He digs a piece of yellow chalk from his bag and scrawls on the board: WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW.

      This is once again a quote proving how uninteractive and dull of a teacher Professor Stevens is being. He is purposely putting down an answer to a question that he had most likely unwillingly asked. He seems to be ticked off due to amazing sensory words like "scrawls" and "scowls" as he was answered with the opposite tone that he had given.

    2. Person101 25 Aug 2020
      After five minutes, he asks for volunteers to share their lists. Dana’s hand shoots up. She’s happy to be there. “My favorite poet is T.S. Eliot,” she says. “He’s so wonderfully complicated.”

      This is the introduction of a new character, Dana - one of Professor Stevens' students. With this quote it is easy to tell that Dana is a peppy and happy in this scene. She excitedly shoots up her hand to complete Professor Stevens' task, completely disregarding how uninteractive and dull her teacher seemed to be.

    3. Person101 25 Aug 2020
      Plastering on a smile, he welcomes the students to Intro to Creative Writing and orders them to take out a pencil and notebook. The kid in the Twins hat scrambles to borrow a pen from the girl sitting next to him. “Write down the name of your favorite poet and five things you know something about,” Stevens commands. “You have five minutes.”

      This short phrase "Plastering on a smile" is simple yet powerful. This phrase illustrate Professor Stevens' lack of enthusiasm for the day. Later on the imagery is really present due to strong word choice such as "orders" and "commands" rather than "said". These words furthermore promote the same idea. Finally, to top it all off we see that he gives his students a very unresponsive task to complete. This shows his lack of involvement portraying Professor Stevens as a non-interactive type teacher.

    4. Person101 25 Aug 2020
      He strolls into his classroom wearing his uniform—faded black jeans that sag in the rear and a worn fleece pullover. He slings his bag onto the table up front and checks his watch—he’s five minutes late, as usual. The students are already seated, and he surveys the assembly.

      This is a scene of imagery that really enhances the experience that Professor Stevens experiences each day. He seems to be a monotone person as he wheres very non-chromatic pieces of clothing while not being punctual, and sagging throughout the morning. This helps better picture what a day in the life of Professor Stevens may be like.

    5. Person101 25 Aug 2020
      Fridays he breakfasts at Burger King before heading out to the lake, where he smokes cigarettes on the shore and ignores his wife’s phone calls. He idolizes James Dickey. He’s no good at fiction. The Department Chair’s out to get him.

      The rest of the first paragraph summarizes a perhaps daily life for Professor Stevens, who does not seem to be like a very happy/joyful person. From this paragraph we can most likely assume that he does not really like his wife all that much as he is ignoring her calls and that he is a smoker. Not all smoker are bad, however judging with the behavior of his wife, he may be using cigarettes to cope with his daily life.

    6. Person101 25 Aug 2020
      Professor Stevens dislikes donuts; the icing gets stuck in his beard.

      This sentence vividly describes what Professor Stevens must be like. The statement states that Professor Stevens gets Icing in his beard whenever he eats donuts. This implies one of two things, either he is slightly clumsy and a small amount of icing happens to drop into his beard. Or he has a lather large beard in which icing happens to get trapped in.

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