The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

by Marina Keegan

I always ask my students to append to their final essay a list of “Personal Pitfalls”—the aspects of their writing they wish to work on in the future. These were some of Marina’s: • Too much polysyndeton.* Watch it! • Don’t overdo the anaphora.** • Be careful of weird strange phrases and their prepositions. • Be careful of parallels. • Make your titles good! Don’t just choose them at the last minute! Avoid alliteration! • Make sure modifiers make sense. • Add more real stories when talking about general ideas. • Make sure to spell-check homophones like “it’s” and “its” by searching the document before finishing. • Don’t use too many adverbs in one sentence. • Similes must actually be capable of doing their thing. You can’t “curl up like a spoon.” • Unusual phrases work better at the end of paragraphs. • I lay an egg, I laid an egg, I have laid an egg. I lie, I lay, I have lain. • Topic indecision—just get over it! • Make sure tenses are consistent. • Don’t use two prepositions in a row. • Don’t get too attached to things. It only took you a minute to write that sentence! • THERE CAN ALWAYS BE A BETTER THING!