Writing Assignment: 5 Minutes Ago

by Randy Murray on May 27, 2011

What were you doing or thinking just five minutes ago?

Most of our day passes without reflection. It’s hard to remember what we had for lunch, let along what we were doing an hour ago.

For the writer, being able to recall and capture a moment in time is very useful. This exercise is designed to help you both exercise your memory and develop the skills of quick capture. It’s also designed to be short, so your example isn’t “five minutes ago I was reading and writing this assignment.”

Here’s my example.

Five minutes ago I was chewing out a telemarketer. It was the second one to call me this morning. I was firm with both, asked to speak with their supervisors. Both ask why. Both had thick accents. And both hung up on me when I said I was on the Do Not Call list.

This last one really pissed me off. I’m still angry. It’s a good thing I work from my home office. I’d hate to have someone walk into my office right now. As it was, the phone call took twenty seconds and I had to spend then next few minutes breathing deeply and looking out my window. The grass needs to be mowed. And the sky is still gray. More rain is coming. And I’m stuck in waiting for the next telemarketer to call.

When I sat back down to work, my heart was still beating too fast, but I was cooled off enough to get back to work.

Damn them all to hell. Parasites all.

You may leave your completed assignment in the comments section below.

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The Writing Assignment: 5 Minutes Ago by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Khürt L Williams May 27, 2011 at 12:35 pm

The completed assignment: http://khurt.com/blog/2011/05/27/5-minutes-ago/

What’s my grade? :-)

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Randy Murray May 27, 2011 at 1:01 pm

A (A plus if you link back to this exercise!).

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