He carefully drafted the letter in his notebook, then borrowed my typewriter to type it up. He seems fascinated by the 'instant' nature of the typewriter, in comparison to the laboriousness of having to wait until the end of wordprocessing something to print it off and get the hard copy in your hands.It's an interesting perspective.
Anyway, here's the finished version.
Now, as an English teacher I'm very happy with the layout and paragraphing. Nice work there, on the whole.
I'm less excited by the unintentionally ironic misspelling of 'literacy' in identifying it as his favourite subject.
Then there is the gradual fading out of capital letters and punctuation (some of which can be blamed on the typewriter - it's a temperamental old thing) and the allergy to spaces between words at times.
But I can let those go.
I'm more bothered by the fact the implicit suggestion that his mother is weird, he's being 'left behind' at school and that he has the onerous task of feeding the cat and dog, as though he lives in some form of Victorian workhouse. The idea that sleeping on a sofa is a particularly human characteristic that the dog has adopted is also a tad troublesome.
For the record, the chicken run is now a peaceful, harmonious - it just took a few days for the pecking order to be established! (Blanche is in charge, in case you were wondering.)
Currently reading: A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

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