Ooooooh....OOOOOOHH!!! (I'm a ghost. Get it?)

For the most part, I was very impressed with the writer's creativity in his scary story. Horror seems to me to be one of the more difficult genres to successfully produce. I wonder though, if this was a draft that was circulated, or a final essay, or maybe even just a free-writing exercise--which opened my eyes to how hard it is to label writing into categories of publication-readiness without having taught the class and worked with the students themselves.

Something that bothered me about the story is the lack of sentence variety. My personal preference with most stories or more informal formats is that the story flows like a conversation. The narrator, to me, is the speaker and thus should sound like a speaker. I felt like the writer was making an effort to structure sentences while he or she wrote. I would encourage the student to instead let the ideas flow out onto the page. The student should work on their own personal voice, and not worry about the structure of the sentence so much. I would prefer to see run-ons and sentence fragments if it was how my student would actually tell a story!

I think the plot of this story is actually very original. What I mean is, I've never read or seen anything like it (although I'll admit I actively avoid the whole horror brand). I would try to be the like Strong's Coach on this one; the student should be cheered on to stick with this story--because it's great!

While I was browsing my colleagues' posts, I saw mention of the author maybe being an ELL student. If that is the case, then this student should be praised! I'm curious then if this story is based off of a culturally-based story or legend. If so, I think that would be a fun lead-in for an in-class discussion (provided the featured student was willing to discuss his story with the class, of course).