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kittykat219's avatar

Can you help me correct my essay?

Asked by kittykat219 (136points) September 25th, 2011

Hello
Right I have to hand in my essay tomorrow and I want to make sure it’s the best it possibly could be ahaha. My teacher grades pretty hard and I really need to pass. Any tips or corrections are very appreciated! :)

Science fiction writers are faced with a lot of challenges when it comes to writing their novels. One of these challenges, for example, is making the Martians in their stories feel like characters in a way that the readers can accept and relate to them. Ray Bradbury, in the novel, “The Martian Chronicles,” was challenged to do this exact thing. Bradbury was given the task of making the Martians in his story have human qualities that we, as humans, could associate with. One of his many characters in his novel is Ylla. Ylla is a lonely Martian housewife who gets very excited when new things happen in her life.

Ylla K is not only plagued with a boring life but also with a husband who hardly pays any attention to her. Mr. K doesn’t seem to really care about her anymore or to be honest, anything she has to say. They live in the middle of nowhere. A house of crystal by the edge of an empty sea is their home. Ylla hates it. She dreams of having someone else to talk to apart from her overbearing husband. Unfortunately though, the closest things that Mrs. K has to neighbours are the desert sands that dance around her lonely house. When she looks into the horizon, sand is the only thing her eyes can see. It seems to go on forever. Ylla feels wrongly treated and neglected by her husband and feels that she deserves a better life than the one she is being forced to live.

So you can imagine Ylla’s joy when she starts having dreams about Earthmen landing on Mars. They are so much nicer than Mr. K and they actually pay attention to her! But there’s one in particular who makes her feel happier than she’s ever been before and his name is Nathaniel York. He tells Mrs. K that she’s beautiful and kisses her, something that her husband is supposed to do. She is even more delighted when York tells her that he would take her away into his ship and back to his home planet with him. Ylla soon starts to yearn for the wonderful dreams. They are something that she looks forward to and they keep her mind off the horrible life she is living. The dreams are an escape from the dreadful reality that she has to suffer through. So, it’s not long before Ylla finds herself longing for the arrival of the kind earthmen who fill her dreams.

Unlike Ylla, Mr. K is not a big fan of change. When he starts hearing Ylla excitedly talking about her wonderful dreams she is experiencing, he responds with the only way he knows how- anger. He believes that with anger, the dreams will eventually go away and so blocks out whatever she has to say about them. Mr. K decides to take her to see entertainment in Xi City. This elicits a very mixed response from Ylla since it is a thing that they haven’t done in months. Mrs. K finds herself not only confused at this idea but also surprised at the same time. It had been ages since Mr. K had expressed any sort of interest in going out with her and to bring it up out of the blue like this was made Ylla feel uneasy.

Mrs. K feels a thrill when a change happens in her lonely life because it’s really the only thing she has to look forward to. So as can you see, Bradbury has done an exceptional job of making this Martian housewife have the qualities of a human because we can all relate to and understand the problems that occur in her life. This is a goal that many Science fiction authors hold while they busy themselves writing their novels. The idea always sits at the back of their mind while they write because the more we, as the readers, connect to their characters, the more we understand their writing and therefore enjoy it.

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4 Answers

jca's avatar

Take out phrases like “so as you can see” and “so you can imagine.”

CWOTUS's avatar

To start with, not all science fiction writers (don’t capitalize Science, as you did toward the end) write about Mars, so they don’t all face the challenge of making “the Martians” seem real to human readers. Use a more generic term to indicate “non-human aliens”. (I’m assuming that Martians aren’t human.)

Bradbury wasn’t “given” any task in his novel. He took up the challenge, he faced the problem, he tackled the issue, etc., but no one said to him, “Here, Ray, make Martians real to me.”

One thing that I’m seeing right off the bat is… how do I know that Martians are different from humans at all? It’s never been made clear to me in your essay that Martians are not human. “Lonely housewife”, “inattentive husband”, “joy” and “dreams” – these are all human roles and attributes, as far as I know.

Apparently, “jealousy” is also a Martian trait. You might want to play with that a bit, too. I still don’t have any idea that Martians aren’t already human, though.

Response moderated (Off-Topic)
gailcalled's avatar

(Poor Yila. I feel by now that I know her well.)

I would do a Draconian edit. It’s a nice essay but too wordy. You write well enough to do the tedious work of editing.

For example: Ylla K is not only plagued with a boring life but also with a husband who hardly pays any attention to her.

” with an indifferent husband ” works in place of “who hardly pays any attention to her.”

For example: Science fiction writers are faced with a lot of challenges when it comes to writing their novel .

“Writers of science fiction are faced with a lot of challenges.”

And this: They are something that she looks forward to and they keep her mind off the horrible life she is living.

“She anticipates her dreams as a distraction from her dreary and stultifying (look it up) life.”

A good word to learn is “genre.” That describes the various kinds of novels…viz; romance, realism, science-fiction. historical, espionage, mystery, etc.

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