Insert Title Here
To the Editor:
Re: “The Trick to Life Is to Keep Moving” Published on September 7th, 2019 by Devi Lockwood described a very good friendship she had with a much older woman. Devi and Cora had an age gap of 51 years. In Lockwood’s letter, she did not highlight the importance of friendships during your high school and college years, saying while they might be important, they might not be the most fulfilling. She highlighted more of deeper topics, such as death and the meaning of life. While some people have a niche for these topics, it can be a lot for someone who is a younger because making friends in the same age group is much more relatable and overall the longest lasting friendships.
Being a freshman in college, I can understand how important friendships are and that its hard to establish within the first week or two of being in a different environment. I relate to Lockwood in the sense that this was the person was her best friend and they were inseparable. I personally have a very close friend and we have been friends since before we can remember, when we were younger we would always hangout because we weren’t in school yet and didn’t have many other friends. I enjoyed Lockwood’s personal story about her plans to travel the world, because me and my best friend share the same dream. We grew up together and had very similar lives which made us closer and also when we made friends they were all the same age group. Lockwood never said the importance of having friends the same age of you or even having other friends.
Lockwood approach is much different the the traditional friendship. She also had similar interests to this person which helped their friendship thrive. I can’t say for myself that I have experienced an older friendship but I can say that making friend throughout high school and college is very necessary for a support system that can always be there for you.
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Thank you so much for the amazing feedback, it was exactly what I was hoping for! I have made revisions to my LTE for Portfolio and will be sure to come back for phrasing and sentence revisions soon.
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I’m so glad to hear that, Roses. I’m eager to read your new Portfolio version. This article was a gratifying read, and your reaction is already rich with personality and emotional depth. If you’ve made it even better, I want to experience it and congratulate you for it.
[But I probably won’t stop picking at it, just so you know.]
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Let’s get to it, Roses. 🙂
I’m going to suppress the numerous recommendations I have to improve your individual sentences and phrasing, Roses, because you asked me specifically for structural advice. But please come back for another round of assistance after making your structural revisions. I suspect I may have more advice to offer.
P1. While it is your obligation to provide your reader enough background to understand your own argument, here you’ve spent an entire paragraph summarizing the article without—at least not obviously—expressing your own position.
Maybe when you say, “While some people have a niche for these topics, it can be a lot for someone who is a younger because making friends in the same age group is much more relatable and overall the longest lasting friendships,” you’re expressing your own opinion, but if so, your reader may not catch the hint. It sounds as if you’re continuing your summary.
So, if I may interpret what I take to be your meaning, I think your final sentence would have to say [something like]: “While some 20-year-olds may be comfortable discussing death and dying with 70-year-olds of their acquaintance, most of us will continue to make friends among our own age group, friendships that will last until we’re in our 70s.”
If that’s what you meant (and I’m by no means certain), you’ll have made your own opinion clear, explained to some degree why you differ from the author, and identified yourself as a 20-something all in one sentence. You’ll also have made an implicit promise to the reader that you’re going to explore what makes inter-generational relationships difficult or unlikely.
P2. Lockwood never made a specific claim about the importance of having same-age friends perhaps because there’s no need to make such a claim. You’re not disagreeing with her to share your own story, nor do you need to. But you could offer, as balance against her position, that your close relationship to your lifelong friend was ENHANCED by your shared history. That would contradict more nearly Lockwood’s observation that she and Cora could be comfortable because they had none. That would give this paragraph much more logical substance.
P3. Here your observation that Devi and Cora built their relationship quickly after discovering shared interests is the best part of your paragraph. It’s also essential to your own friendship as described in P2. You could emphasize that similarity and hold out the possibility for yourself that if you approached an older person with an openness to discovering how much you have in common, you might surprise yourself. What I mean is you don’t seem antagonistic to Lockwood’s thesis, just maybe a little envious that she didn’t have to confine herself to just one sort of person. If that’s in you, it would add a sympathetic human touch that the editors other readers would probably appreciate.
Is that the sort of help you were hoping for? expecting? grateful to have?
Please respond so I know how to interact with you in future feedback sessions, Roses.
By all means leave THIS POST alone as evidence of where you started. Copy and paste its text into your new LTE for Portfolio—Roses post and MAKE YOUR REVISIONS THERE.
And thank you for inviting me to offer guidance on this work. I enjoyed reading it, and I very much enjoy the interaction.
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Can I please receive feedback on the structure in my essay? Looking forward to revising my draft!
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Roses, you didn’t make a specific Feedback request. I will return to offer feedback, but first I’ll respond to your classmates who gave me guidance about the sort of responses they wanted.
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I just added a comment on what I wanted feedback on. Thank you!
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Thanks, Roses. That moves you up in the queue. 🙂
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