Young Writers Society

Hello hello! I'm here to bring this out of the green room for you

I really love the thought behind this piece. I'm a nature lover too, and I try to do my part to help keep our environment clean and healthy. To me, this reads like a very short persuasive essay. I'm not sure if that was your intention for it or not, but i think my biggest qualm is that I want more of it.

No matter what style or type of piece you're going for here, in the end you're trying to persuade your reader to take care of the environment. That's great. But pretend your reader is someone that knows nothing about the environment and why it's important to recycle and take care of our planet. What specific evidence would you use to convince that person of this importance?

You're using a lot of your own opinions, and that's awesome, this is an opinion piece, but I think you could elaborate on those opinions a bit more and maybe supplement your opinions with some facts or figures when possible. That way, it's not just one person (you) trying to convince your reader, you have other sources backing you up.

As you expand, I also think it would be beneficial to break this up into a few paragraphs. Right now, it's in one paragraph and it reads like one big continuous thought to me. It's not one big continuous thought. You have a lot of separate, and good, ideas in here, and breaking them up will just allow you to highlight each idea more.

Overall, I think this is a nice little piece. I'm not sure if you were looking for critiques and feedback or not, but if you were I hope you found this helpful! Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or if there's something you'd like feedback about that I didn't mention!

Hi there!

This is basically the way I feel about nature. If I'm really miserable about things, it helps a lot to go out somewhere green and wallow in it a while. Have you heard this song by Tracy Chapman? I think you'd like it.

However, I think you could expand a lot on this. It depends a lot on your purpose! Are you writing an ode to nature, singing its praises? Do you want to impart a love of nature to others? Or are you trying to convince people that it's important to protect the environment, both because it's beautiful and for our own good?

If you're simply writing its praises, think about all the specific things you love about nature. Birds, yes, but which ones? (I love the call of red-winged blackbirds, personally.) Which flowers? (Dandelions <3) What are some smells, sights, and sounds you experience in nature that you particularly love? Do those things remind you of childhood memories or other smells, sights, and sounds you also love? Plus you mention God. I'm sort of a rogue Catholic, but I've always felt closer to God out in the woods than somewhere with people orating or a half-asleep congregation in church. Is this the sort of thing you experience? Or do you see nature more as a gift from God, but not necessarily somewhere to go to find him?

If you think about these things, you can include the answers here. It'll draw readers in and really show them your love of nature in a more concrete way.

On the other hand, maybe your intent was to persuade people to care about the environment. In that case, you can focus on beauty for a short while but should also include specific examples of the ways nature benefits us and the ways human activity that hurts nature can also hurt us.

(Example: the importance of bees as pollinators and the problems with bees dying off.)

Plus, you have to consider that nature does sometimes cause a lot of destruction - think about Hurricane Katrina, the wildfires and mudslides in California, the sheep farmers who are afraid that wolves or coyotes will steal their lambs and ruin their farm. Obviously those things don't mean we shouldn't care for nature, but if you want to persuade people to protect it, then you'll need to bring up possible counterarguments like these instances and then present reasons why they're wrong or why protecting nature outweighs the threats it sometimes poses.

(Example: you could research and discuss the role of predators in the environment. We absolutely 100% HAVE to have deer-hunting season in Michigan, for example, because people killed off most of the wolves, so now the white-tailed deer population spirals out of control, destroys the environment by overeating, and then crashes due to lack of food unless hunters take the place of the wolves that used to naturally keep the deer at bay.)

Whereas if you simply meant to share your thoughts and weren't going in any particular direction - and especially if you just wanted people's thoughts on this issue rather than actual reviews - you can always post things like this on your YWS blog or in the forums in the future. Then you can discuss it with people as an issue, rather than a piece of literature, and it won't cost you any points!

So it all depends on what you intended to do with this, but those are my suggestions.

Write on!
Blue