She's the Type to Cry When the Villain Dies

Veronica is a thoroughly emotional writer, in every sense of the term—she writes in a way that conveys not only her own emotions towards the text about which she is writing, but also what emotion it is that the text itself portrays. Emotion seems to be what speaks to her, particularly the portrayal of emotion in literature. One of her more recently written abstracts (written for an essay which she says that she does, at one point, hope to finish) was based fully on Jane Austen’s sense of the “androgynous mind” and “human” emotion versus “male” and “female” emotion. This sense of writing, however, while it can be rather insightful and humanizing, can also cause the writer to lack somewhat appallingly in other even basic areas.

1.       Because of her emotionality, Veronica can miss even the most basic aspects of how else the author portrays important themes or ideas. For example, when writing about Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, although she was aware that Woolf’s use of the stream-of-consciousness narrative was important, because it in itself is not emotional, she had difficulty weaving it into her interpretation as well as she might have.

2.       Veronica can sometimes over-emotionalize. The current literary and educational American climate is to be given a sheet of paper and asked to emote about a topic. This can take away the solid and much-needed ability to completely objectify. Veronica, sadly, has fallen partially into this same pit.

However, there are upsides to this style of writing.

1.       Veronica is able to identify character traits and the sentiments behind them. She has a good ability to deeply understand a wide variety of characters, thus allowing her to be able to identify flaws or qualities in characters that might otherwise be labelled as “good” or “bad.”

2.       She is very intuitive; she is able to pick up on even subtle hints at feeling. She can observe small nudges in certain emotional directions, which makes her good at picking up on certain types of foreshadowing and plot clues.

While these qualities are well placed in her, overall, Veronica’s writing is an amalgamation of words that she probably looked up in a thesaurus, and a lot of hormones. Neither of those things are inherently bad, however, she could probably do with a heavy dose of objectivity. Perhaps she should be assigned essays on computers.