From Richard Nordquist,
Your Guide to Grammar & Composition.
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A regular contributor to This American Life on Public Radio International, author Sarah Vowell once described writing in the first person as "a great place to hide, especially with essays." In this carefully crafted paragraph from the essay "Shooting Dad," Vowell conveys distinct impressions of her father and herself by describing--and comparing--their different work spaces at home.

from "Shooting Dad"

by Sarah Vowell

Our house was partitioned off into territories. While the kitchen and the living room were well within the DMZ, the respective work spaces governed by my father and me were jealously guarded totalitarian states in which each of us declared ourselves dictator. Dad's shop was a messy disaster area, a labyrinth of lathes. Its walls were hung with the mounted antlers of deers he'd bagged, forming a makeshift museum of death. The available flat surfaces were buried under a million scraps of paper on which he sketched his mechanical inventions in blue ball-point pen. And on the floor, carpeted with spiky metal shavings, was a tetanus shop waiting to happen. My domain was the cramped, cold space known as the music room. It was also a messy disaster area, an obstacle course of musical instruments--piano, trumpet, baritone horn, valve trombone, various percussion doodads (bells!), and recorders. A framed portrait of the French composer Claude Debussy was nailed to the wall. The available flat surfaces were buried under piles of staff paper, on which I penciled in the pompous orchestra music given titles like "Prelude to the Green Door" (named after an O. Henry short story by the way, not the watershed porn flick Behind the Green Door) I started writing in junior high.

Originally broadcast on the Public Radio International program This American Life, "Shooting Dad" appears in Sarah Vowell's collection Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World (Simon & Schuster, 2000).