B&A: School Days - Excerpt - Critique please?

Here's two tips which you can apply to your writing, and how they might improve your first paragraph: 1. Use active verbs, not passive, and stick with either past tense of present tense, not progressive. Use is/was/are/were as little as possible.

They’re terribly weak verbs and eat up your word count. (Also avoid the various forms of other weak verbs: look, see, have, get, go, start, begin, try, make, play, take, wonder, seem, appear, and ‘there is’ structure.) 2. Get rid of adverbs.

A weak verb modified or amplified by an adverb is always a worse choice than a stronger verb. Marking your progressive-tense verbs, weak verbs, and adverbs with *asterisks*, you wrote: Akira Holm *had* a prominent scowl as he walked *slowly* in the shadows of the silent night. He *had* his gloved hands stuffed in the pockets of his black biker jacket which *was* zipped up to the neck.

The breeze whipping at his face *was* cold and he *was* *shivering* *slightly*. A one-pass rewrite might read: Akira Holm scowled as he stalked in the shadows of the silent night. His gloved hands bulged in the pockets of his black biker jacket, zipped up to the neck.

He shivered at the cold breeze whipping his face. Not deathless prose, but shorter and stronger. See if you can apply those two lessons to the rest.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.