Critique on "Voicemails"

Sara Angela Rodriguez

A415-002/Chambers

Student Critique/Voicemails

4/26/2013

This piece is about a young woman, Anne, who seems to be obsessed with one of her classmates, Marcy, and goes to great lengths to make contact with her, but fails. I really liked the concept and the structure of your piece, but I think that in order to make it even better than it is you have to tighten it up a bit by omitting some of the repetition and vocabulary. I really liked how Marcy’s voicemail continues to repeat, being the only communication that goes on between her and Anne, but I think that it’s too much to have the ringing repeat too. I think that it would be better for the ringing to happen once but from then on to show the call cutting straight to voicemail. Also, on the subject of the rings, I think that the vocabulary that you use for them “[…] quadruple, quintuple, sextuple […]” is kinda sorta slightly weird. I think that it would be better to have the phone ring “once, twice, three…six times” because it would sound better. Though, like I mentioned before, only have the ringing sequence once. As for the content of the story, I think it’s fine, though I do wish that I could see more text messages. Yes, phone calls are more personal but I feel like Anne, being the stalker that she is, would also bombard Marcy with text messages.