I grew up in a college prep middle/high school. I had a great education in all of the subjects, but I always did a bit better in English than anything else. I never had trouble writing essays and reports in college and grad school because I had this great training in how to write formally.
Then I started living online. My IMs used to reflect my education. Full sentences. Proper grammar. The works. It earned me a few unkind comments, even from my friends, so I started letting that go. Thankfully, I haven’t slipped into the chaos known as Txtspeak. You can still understand what I’m trying to say.
Someone gave me an online journal, and my formal writing training followed me there. Imagine someone telling you about their day-to-day activities and their opinions in a dry, academic tone. That was me six years ago. (Oh, man, has it really been that long?) That tone followed me into my blogging two years later. Even better, I have a FictionPress account full of novels, character sketches, and a graphic novel script that all reek of this formal academic tone I mastered as a teenager.
Call me crazy, but neither blogging nor fiction should sound stiff. In fact, I’m even starting to believe that nonfiction should have a sense of the person, even if it’s a how-to book.
However, I feel like I can’t shake off the formal tone, despite the fact I’d like to inject more of myself into what I’m writing. I’ve been wrestling with this desire for over a year now. I’ve made plan after plan with myself to fix it, but nothing’s coming.
A new friend reads my journal, and he told me over the weekend that he thought I was a great writer. I thought he meant my fiction, but he meant my journaling. My journaling lacks that stiffness, that formal academic tone that’s driving me crazy. I admitted to him that when I journal, I don’t think I’m writing. I think I’m just venting or sharing something cool or just trying to clear my head. I never think of my journals as writing, which is probably the most preposterous thing in the world.
My journals tell me that I am more than capable of maintaining formal mechanics while letting my rather humorous, sarcastic nature shine through. So, why can’t I get myself to write like that when I feel like I’m actually writing?
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:35 AM EST
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Spelling seems to have become the bane of many people’s existence. I’d even argue that people are nearly as willing to accept being bad at spelling as they are at math. I’m not even sure half my students are even given weekly spelling words anymore.
Amazingly, a fair number of my students don’t pronounce words correctly, and this shows when they go to try to sound out a word so they can write it. We do this great job in reading programs of teaching children how to decode unfamiliar words by sounding them out. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that sounding out is a skill that spans more than just reading. It’s a great plan of attack for writing a word you aren’t sure how to spell.
Provided you’re saying the word correctly.
I think we can all agree that the word many people pronounce “NOO-ku-lar” (either seriously or in fun) is not spelled “nucular” or anything similar. That’s because the word is pronounced “NEW-klee-ur” and as such is spelled “nuclear”.
Another favorite misspelling I see among my students when they try to sound out a spelling involves the syllable “pre”. Nearly every single one of my darlings pronounces this syllable “per”, and as such spell it out as “per” or “pur”
If you have a word you can’t spell to save your life, think about how you’re pronouncing it. Go look up the pronunciation in a dictionary just to be certain. It doesn’t work for every word (have to love those “outlaw words”), but I bet you’ll find your spelling improving by leaps and bounds!
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:04 AM EST
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I realize this is going to sound a bit crazy, but the next time you find yourself stumped in your writing, grab the nearest dictionary, open it to a random page, pick a random word, and work it into your writing. (Yes, this has worked amazingly well for some of my students, especially lately.)
You’ll more than likely be left with something you need to edit out of your writing, but at least you’re writing, and potentially learning a new word in the process.
Posted by Rebecca as Writing Prompts at 7:57 AM EST
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One of my goals on my secret to-do list is to take an improv class, or at the very least, sit and watch one rehearse. I always thought it would be a great way to work on improving my writing because it would hopefully get me into the mindset of reacting in the moment and riffing on something.
It turns out that another writer is doing the improv scene and has found something useful for writers- a game called, “Yes, and…” Actually, she’s found a handful of improv techniques that can help writers, but I really liked the game. She suggested it as a reminder of accepting what’s thrown at you and building from there, but I think as a writing prompt on its own, it could be fairly useful. You write out something, get stuck, and then say “Yes, and…” instead of “What now?”
I think this could be a great way to work through difficult scenes and writer’s block. Just remember it’s only a draft and you can change things later when you’re editing.
Posted by Rebecca as Writing Prompts at 8:39 AM EST
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I thought John Hewitt’s advice on revising the first draft of a novel came at the perfect time- right as thousands of people were finishing up National Novel Writing Month.
I have my own way of navigating the revising and editing processes, but these tips might be perfect for you if you’re just looking at your first or second manuscript, and asking yourself what to do next.
Posted by Rebecca as Resources at 7:45 AM EST
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A great post on The Elegant Variation last week shared the dangers of descriptions. It reminded me of notes I often write on my students’ essays when they’re trying to describe something. More often than not, the description is worded just oddly enough to cause something weird to happen in the sentence.
For example, I once had a student who was trying to describe the differences between summer and winter, and she had a sentence that had people sitting in a roaring fire while drinking cocoa. I’ve had several students talk about their modular body parts in essays about video games where the characters’ bodies were not meant to be easily taken apart. I always have the student read the sentence aloud to me and then I read it back to them before asking them to rewrite the sentence to say what the student really intended to say. Usually, the student has a great laugh when they hear what they wrote, and are only too happy to take the minute or five necessary to restructure the sentence.
Careless descriptions are a lot like misplaced modifiers. Both creep into your writing when you aren’t looking, and you might completely miss them when reading over your work quietly but they should jump out at you when you read over your work out loud. If you still find yourself having trouble finding them, then find a trusted friend or teacher to read over your essay or story for careless descriptions.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:43 AM EST
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Copyblogger had a great post the other day on common punctuation errors that keep people’s writing from looking as polished as it could be. Master these few tips to keep your work looking good.
He’s given his advice on each one, but I’d like to add my own thoughts on what to watch for with each one.
1. Apostrophe for plurals- Ask yourself is you’re talking about an owner or if you’ve created a contraction. If you haven’t done either, leave the apostrophe out.
2. The Comma Splice- Ask yourself if you’re joining two related clauses or two independent full thoughts. If it’s the second, make them separate sentences. (A number of my students commit this error because they know long complicated sentences are supposed to be the sign of better writing. They learn fairly quickly that this doesn’t help.)
3. Quotation marks for emphasis- I’ve never seen this one happen, but if you feel compelled to use quotation marks, then ask yourself who you are quoting. If you aren’t quoting anybody, leave out the quotation marks.
4. Multiple exclamation marks- Your words should convey the emotion of your sentence, not your marks. Keep that in mind.
5. Punctuation outside the quotation marks- I wrestle with this one. It’s really a matter of where you live whether or not this is true. That said, if you’re writing a sentence inside the quotation marks, then the punctuation must go inside as part of the sentence.
6. The missing comma after introductory elements- Ask yourself if part of your sentence could just as easily come at the end of the sentence. If it can, put a comma behind it to separate it from the rest of the sentence.
He gives some great examples of the right and wrong way to approach these.
If you’d like to learn more about punctuation, read Eats, Shoots, and Leaves by Lynne Truss.
Posted by Rebecca as Resources at 8:54 AM EST
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National Novel Writing Month started last week. Writers around the world are wrestling with plot, setting, characters.
That last one can be a bit tricky. Naming characters has always been my least favorite part of the process. In fact, I probably wrote the majority of the first volume of my graphic novel script referring to the two main characters as Writer Girl and Actor Boy. I used to keep a baby naming book in my stack of writing books to help me, but it pretty much only contained English names, and I needed more than that.
There are tons of name generators on the web, but I like my character names to have something of a purpose when possible, so those don’t work for me, either.
PoeWar.com offers some tips for naming a character, but those don’t necessarily work for me, either. The very first tip is to keep names distinct, and my current series doesn’t do that. I intentionally named a pair of characters who are frequently near the main character “Michael” and “Miguel”. The story is set in a school, and you have and incredible chance of running into people with the same or similar names, so I had this pair. The two are quite different, and their relationships with the other characters are pretty different. No one has any trouble differentiating between them.
PoeWar also offers links to other naming resources. If you’re trying to name a character and are feeling stuck, give them a try. Just remember to Google your created name to make sure it isn’t a real person, or that your character is absolutely nothing like the real person.
Posted by Rebecca as Resources at 8:22 AM EST
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There seems to be this debate raging quietly: Are bullet points still effective?
Bullet points were originally used to call out important information the writer didn’t want the reader to miss. They then became ubiquitous with presentations, sales material, learning material, and nearly everything else.
As with all widely accepted practices, bullet points are now wavering between overused and, as such, greatly ignored, or still the best thing since peanut butter.
Presentations, trying to keep up with this new surge in media, are trying to decide how much bullet points contribute to the audience’s absorption of information. Beyond Bullet Points (great book) suggests that presentations should drop bullet points in favor of blended visual-auditory experiences, the argument being that bullet points invite audiences to tune out the speaker and miss important supplementary information.
Writing, on the other hand, seems to still be trying to find the balance between well-done, well-used bullet points and bulleting for the sake of bulleting. Bullets are still being used to show what’s really important, but writers are finding they need to use them with purpose, too. (My source on this one is actually a very nice post on how to not write a how-to post. She really does a great job of showing the inherent benefits and problems with relying on bullets.)
Perhaps it’s a matter of the information you’re trying to convey, and the way you’re trying to convey it.
Posted by Rebecca as Resources at 8:27 AM EDT
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Just in time for NaNoWriMo, there is a cool new mash-up to help you find popular names for the United States and parts of Europe.
Of course, this only helps if you’re trying to name characters set in the real world…and at the current time. For those writing in the past, you can always research census data. For those writing in the future, you can find interesting names and mangle them to your heart’s content.
If you’re writing in a world of your own creation, research name generators!
Posted by Rebecca as Resources at 7:37 AM EDT
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