Drowning in words...glub, glub

FROM SAMUEL

Chapter 1

“Do you swear upon this holy bible that the information you filled out in this athletic packet is correct to the best of your knowledge and that you live at the address designated?”

“Yes,”

The Notary lady looked indifferently down at the forms before her, signing a page here or there.

“You know you can take your hand off the bible now,”

“Oh yeah, sorry,” I said.

I signed where she told me too, nervously. Very nervously. I was very nervous about the ordeal of transferring from private school into Green Stick High School.

You see, my zoned public high school was this school called Cimmaron Memorial High School. They didn’t really have any money or good teachers or any of the things you would probably want at a school. Cimmaron was in the ghetto.

I was a rich white kid. I didn’t want to go to Cimmaron. I had my mom borrow my aunt’s power bill so that I could prove that I was indeed zoned for Green Stick High School when we registered.

That was the only thing you needed to do in order to go to a different high school than you were zoned for, show you had a power bill.

At the time, I was very nervous about lying to the government. I had nightmares that some guy was going to come along and knock at my aunt’s house demanding to step in side to see if I actually lived there. I went so far as to make my mom change the address on her driver’s license to my aunt’s address.

In reality though, the prospect of tracking down and verifying where 3,500 kids actually live was impossible. It’s a wonder that families ever sent their kids to schools they didn’t want to because of the lines that some education board drew on a map every few years.

Naturally, I wasn’t the only rich white kid to enter Green Stick who wasn’t zoned for Green Stick. The school was teeming with them. Green Stick was horribly overcrowded and growing. But because the school had so many rich white kids, it had money, the best programs, and the best teachers. That made more rich white kids want to come.

I looked down at the paperwork we had just completed and notarized. They had nothing to do with me actually being admitted to Green Stick. We had registered several weeks beforehand. These extensive forms were actually for the NIAA, Nevada’s all-powerful agency in charge of the surprisingly heavily regulated world of high school athletics. It only made sense to regulate the very profitable world of high school athletics with an institution like the NIAA, which held absolute power over all sporting events and associated revenue, making rules and regulation, and interpreting those rules and regulations.

I was transferring from 21st Century Private School to Green Stick High School for my junior year, and the NIAA said that if you moved to another school during high school, you had to prove that you hadn’t been recruited to play sports and that you weren’t changing schools for athletic reasons. You had to notarize all this paperwork and write letters and stuff if you wanted to have a chance to play sports if you were a transfer student.

If the NIAA graciously chose to accept your forms, then you were automatically declared ineligible for varsity competition for a full year but you were allowed to join a team as a non-competitive member. For football and basketball, the sports that really mattered to the NIAA, that basically killed any athlete’s career and chances of being recruited to any college.

Luckily, all I wanted was to be on the cross-country team. Because I wanted to do cross country and not football, nobody really cared what I did. The coach put me in a bunch of races throughout the year and nobody said anything.

“Well I guess that’s that,” my mom said. And we walked out of the notary.

CRITIQUE

Well, I think I detect a teensy bit of story and characterization under all that lousy writing. You use empty, weak verbs, unneeded detail, and horrendous repetition for starters. Let’s look at this 95-word paragraph as an example:

First, do you really need to tell the reader what these papers aren’t and why they aren’t? Nope. 76 words:

I looked down at the paperwork we had just completed and notarized. These extensive forms were actually for the NIAA, Nevada’s all-powerful agency in charge of the surprisingly heavily regulated world of high school athletics. It only made sense to regulate the very profitable world of high school athletics with an institution like the NIAA, which held absolute power over all sporting events and associated revenue, making rules and regulation, and interpreting those rules and regulations.

Second, I wonder if you can see just a tad bit of repetition in those 76 words, because I see about a ton. Shall we remove it? 43 words:

I looked down at the paperwork we had just completed and notarized. These extensive forms were actually for the NIAA, Nevada’s regulatory agency, which held absolute power over all sporting events and associated revenue in the highly profitable world of high school athletics.

Can we shorten it further and maybe use some better verbs? I think so. 36 words:

I gazed wearily at the completed and notarized stack of paperwork required by the NIAA, Nevada’s regulatory agency, which exercised absolute power over all sporting events and associated revenue in the highly profitable world of high school athletics.

Pretty darn long sentence. Maybe let's chop it in two:

I gazed wearily at the completed and notarized stack of paperwork required by the NIAA. This regulatory agency exercised absolute power over all sporting events and associated revenue in the highly profitable world of Nevada high school athletics.

Edit your writing in this way, and you might end up with something a little more interesting and easier to read

RESPONSE

John, I agree with you that the paragraph you edited was particularly cumbersome. Still, I feel overall that my writing here is clear and my reader already has a pretty good sense of my main character's personality. The simple verbs and repetition overall add style to my character's narration. Now that you point it out, I do see some other instances (like the paragraph following the one you critiqued) where the repetition is in excess but these are easy edits…Thank you for your edit

COMMENT

Alrighty, but if I can remove 60% of a paragraph and still provide the same necessary information, that ought to give you some hefty pause. And I'll be bold here and say that it is impossible for your writing to be clear or reveal anyone's personality effectively when it's drowning in superfluous words.

Your verbs are not simple, they're empty - dead wood. The only thing repetition adds is repetition (shall I repeat that? Lol).

But...to each his own.