By Catherine Kelleher

To contact me:                                

Phone: 718-941-5450
E-mail: misskelleher@hotmail.com

My Writing Goals

Before writing this narrative account, I had never written a story from someone else’s point of view.  One of my writing goals was to make my character believable;  even though I’ve never had many of the experiences that Alkeema had, I wanted people to feel like these things could have happened.  I think I did a pretty good job of that by researching the African slave trade and talking to my Social Studies teacher about that period in history.  I also had a very good idea of what my character was like, and I worked hard to make sure that the emotions she talked about and the things that she did would have followed along with her character.

I also have a hard time writing dialogue, and another one of my goals was to really focus on my quotation and punctuation marks to make sure I had all of my dialogue written correctly.  I did this by using the spelling and grammar check feature on Microsoft Word to check my dialogue.  Looking at something with another pair of eyes is also helpful for picking up on errors that I may have made!  I worked closely with my editing partner to make sure that every sentence that included dialogue was written correctly.

My third writing goal was to make sure that EVERY word was spelled correctly.  I did this by once again using SpellCheck, as well as other resources such as a dictionary and my teacher.  It took a lot of work to keep checking over every word to make sure it was spelled correctly, but I did it and caught every error I could.  Now my narrative is complete and is PERFECT! 

Keep your writing goals in mind while you work!