Villanueva Exercise

Exercise 1
     A murder, forty years ago. A couple ran for their lives in the midst of Brooklyn as a man was struck with a knife at a party. Their son, three years old at the time, still remembers the event by a picture hanging on the wall of their home.
     At 41 Bartlett Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn sat a little boy behind a pegboard desk watching his father carry a roll of linoleum as he sat in the middle of a furniture-less living room. With a neighbor nearby, this three year old sits there. Looking back, it seemed to this three year old that this was a new sign of affluence: moving up from the storefront flat.
     The young boy wanders the street alone starting at age four. He walks to John Lee's Hand Laundry from Bartlett. He also will head from Bartlett to somewhere near the Myrtle Avenue el. He walks alone, no one asks where his mother is, he roams the streets and is the shortest one on each street corner.

Exercise 2
Original Text:
     By 1924 there were legal restrictions against the admission of ruddy-skinned Eastern Europeans and Mediterranean new immigrants to the United States.

Rewritten Text:
    The Eastern European and Mediterranean immigrants felt unwelcome as more and more restrictions were put in place to deny access to these groups of immigrants. They all thought America was the land of the free, more like the land of the anti-immigrants.


Reaction to story and exercise:
  I thought the story was interesting, in the way that he mixed academic and casual writing. However the academic writing was quiet blah, because he inserted a lot of facts and I felt as he may have went of topic a little. The exercise was a little hard, I don't usually write in academic tone. Even if it is an essay for a class like a research paper, it's not my thing to be very blah. I enjoy side comments and expressing a story through words, not just pictures in your memory. And switching my little portion to casual writing was a little difficult however I think it turned out okay. Academic writing is not my cup of tea and neither is switching it to casual writing or Vice versa.