Column- "a plea to play"

     Recently my independent reading has been a little slow, but the topic of columns has still been on my mind for some reason. The Enquirer came this weekend (I guess thats not much of a surprise) and I thought I'd look through it to see if there were any good columns. It being a newspaper and it being that newspaper writers jobs are to write good columns, It also wasn't a huge surprise that I found one. The story is called "a plea to play" if you'd like to read it, and i thought if was good because it almost followed the guidelines that we needed for our creative nonfiction pieces. The story is about a political refugee from the Democratic Republic of congo and he lives here in Ohio. But the larger world issue is not what the article focusses on. The article aims at telling his story of ineligibility to play soccer as a senior, and his dream to do so.
     I'm not really supposed to summarize it here, so if you're interested, I would suggest going and reading it yourself, because it was a very well- written article. What I found in the article as I read through it, was that the author had used a lot of the techniques that we talked about in class (so I guess Mrs. Bross wasn't making that up after all).that most prevalent techniques I noticed was that the author used a lot of more casual, conversational diction that avoided being chatty. this can be seen in sentences like, "The alarm clock sounds at 5:30 a.m. Daniel gets ready in his family's Millvale apartment, then we walks down the street to catch the bus to Hyde Park for school." Here, not only did I notice that the author was using casual diction, but also that it was used to create a more relaxed tone. It is like this throughout the article even though it talks about an issue that is not necessarily of national concern, but affects the life of one person greatly.