Tommy Said:

Does social status segregate high school classes?

We Answered:

When I read your question. .. I DID think about socio-economic status. From my own life experience, when you go to high school in a small town, everyone knows whether you have money or you don't, and there are 'cliques' that form around that. Social status is also denoted by the clothes you wear to school or parties, the car you drive to school, etc.

I also want to mention that this is one good argument people give for uniforms in schools. Some people feel that when you have people wear the same thing, you do remove some social class issues. (Everyone understands that other things will still come into play, but having uniforms does take the competition down a notch.) I have personally never worn a uniform in school (except in Vet Tech school) but I have spoken to people who did have this experience, and thought uniforms made a positive difference.

Valerie Said:

High school english!! help asap please. Creative writing/short story. Urgent as well!?

We Answered:

You definitely need to clean up your grammar and mechanics, and you have a few spelling/homophone errors.

Most importantly, though, I would focus on what your teacher said about telling too much. Have you ever heard the phrase "show, don't tell" related to creative writing? It's very important.

The entire first paragraph, except for the dialogue, is "telling." You tell us that the narrator and Justin are friends, you tell us what Justin looks like, you tell us their interests, you tell us about Brooke. It's not a story, it's a personal ad. If you really want to get this information across, SHOW it (but first, analyze whether it's important to the story — at 600 words, there's not a lot of room for extraneous detail). SHOW us that the narrator and Justin are friends by the way they interact. Let us see, gradually, what Justin looks like, by dropping in details when they're relevant. Get rid of Brooke entirely, since you don't use her for anything.

You also spend an inordinate amount of time on basketball. It's a central theme, yes, but we don't need all the details of times and dates. It's not important. The vital information (that premier team is more demanding than social) can be gotten across with descriptive words rather than a quantitative list. That's true of a lot of things in this story — for example, the narrator's assertion that Justin's under a physical strain: you need to show (Justin looked pale, he'd lost weight, he had dark circles under his eyes, he moved slowly, he fell asleep in class) instead of tell ("I could really see the physical strain upon him"). Use descriptions that give us a mental image of what's going on.

Just keep that in mind, and you shouldn't have any trouble cleaning this up.

Wade Said:

Creative, interesting ideas to write about?

We Answered:

An interesting article for teens would be the down falls of texting. Sure it is a great way to get information out there, but sometimes things we text can be used against us as it is a permanent record of one's thoughts. So, if someone texted their honest opinion about a situtation or person and their words came back to haunt them, they would be in hot water.

Tyler Said:

What would you want to see on an online school newspaper?

We Answered:

Sport scores
List of people who are making honor role
Featured pets of various students
Polls that people could take
Advertisements for jobs

Chad Said:

How would this high school schedule look to college admissions?

We Answered:

Depends on what school what you want to get into. This is not an Ivy League Prospect schedule because of the lack of APs. Most Ivy-League prospects have at least 3 or 4 APs by the end of their junior years. But you can look into some lower tier 1 schools, and you might fit more into the tier 2 schools.