Late last summer, I started teaching writing at work. Since I write a lot on my own, it was assumed I’d do great at teaching writing.
I was pretty nervous. I still am when confronted by a writing student, although I know a lot of that now has to do more with a teacher in the center who has decided we must all do everything her way, despite the fact she has been told she’s not always right.
I sat there teaching grammar and parts of speech. I explained the point of the thesis sentence. I just felt paralyzed when it came to revising and editing because a fellow teacher had told me that it was a no-no to offer any sort of help at these stages. It turns out that was wrong, but I was still terrifed to help.
Not long after I became a writing teacher, I started grading papers for a local high school. I was asked to make specific comments and to help with grammar. The second I could do easily enough from my time as an editor. The first…yeah, that paralyzing fear from the first job held me back. I think it actually cost me the job.
A few months ago, I started editing for people on a freelance basis. Without even thinking about it, I’ve attacked these stories with the same energy I attacked my editing job. No idea why. Before long, I realized I was starting to treat the center papers the same way- making comments on the sides, circling grammar and spelling errors for the student to correct.
It’s been odd to watch myself shift. It’s been a great benefit to everyone I work with.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:38 AM EST
No Comments »
I’ve always considered myself to have a pretty strong grasp on grammar, and English language arts in general. Lately, though, I think some terms have come into cofusion.
Rebecca teaches at a tutoring center, and she came home baffled the other day. Actually, it turned out she was baffled by something that had her thinking for a while. She has to teach homonyms and multiple meaning words…except she and I both think those are the same thing.
Curious, I went to the lovely search bar in Firefox, changed it to the dictionary, and got the following definition for homonym: “one of two or more words spelled and pronounced alike but different in meaning (as the noun quail and the verb quail)”
This matches with what we both think a homonym is. It’s the same word with a different meaning.
In talking with Rebecca, I think we’ve both decided that what she’s being asked to teach as homonyms are actually homophones- words that sound alike but are spelled differently. The same handy dictionary had the following to say on the matter: “one of two or more words pronounced alike but different in meaning or derivation or spelling (as the words to, too, and two)”.
How did these two terms not only become confused, but become synonymous. (The dictionary actually suggested that “homonym” is a synonym for “synonym”. We were beside ourselves!)
Posted by Ceara as Uncategorized at 8:29 AM EST
No Comments »
I spend quite a bit of time blogging or reading blogs. In fact, blogging has kind of taken over my life for the past two years. I started my first blog when they were just becoming a new toy for the masses.
So, i guess it just really bothers me when those aspiring to A-list or those involved in edublogging get all up in arms when others create a link blog.
I’ve decided that these ambitious folk don’t remember how the web log got started. It wasn’t as a journal, or a means of self-publishing, or a marketing tool. It was for the purpose of storing links people found interesting on the web. Some people just logged their links. Others wrote notes to help themselves remember why they were logging the link.
In time, people constructed narratives around their links, and the narratives became personal. People started visiting these pages for suggestions on what to read. Search engines saw these link blogs as support for whether a site was good.
When someone creates a link blog, they are blogging in its original form. Perhaps the wanna-be A-listers and the edubloggers should go back and do their homework. Blogging history can be a fun thing!
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:39 AM EST
No Comments »
All of my writing efforts go online somewhere or other, and so I’ve had to adapt my style to accomodate the needs of publishing to the web.
The hardest adaptation, perhaps, was giving up the indention of my paragraphs for adding a space in beween paragraphs. The second hardest was losing the second space after my periods. One is a white space consideration to help reduce eye strain. The other is undoing a convention established by the use of typewriters, where the additional spce was needed to help clarify if the smudge mark was a period or a comma.
Those are just technical considerations, but I’ve been running across articles on other needs that have to be considered in online writing. Most of them come from the styling of the page. Clear writing in the header and navigation helps engage visitors and encourage them to stay longer. Content-rich information on web site brings people to your site.
If you do everything correctly, addressing the needs of your technology-tethered audience might even bring you work and eventually income!
Posted by Ceara as Uncategorized at 7:49 AM EST
No Comments »
The Writer’s Resource Center recently shared a couple of posts on self expression. As I teach my students, I often hear many of these complaints out of my writing students. They won’t write because they can’t spell, they don’t know many words, it’s too much effort.
I keep telling them that it gets easier with practice. A writer I know reminded us all at the beginning of the year that you have to write a million words of junk before you get to the good stuff. It’s not so much about the specific word count there, it’s just about practice. Anyone and everyone will tell you that the the only way to get better at writing is to go out and do it. Do it often. Do it for different reasons. Just, for fear of sounding like a well-known company slogan, do it!
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:14 AM EST
No Comments »
I see the writing cycle as a handful of distinct steps:
- Conception/Idea generation
- Writing
- Editing
- Publishing
I spend quite a bit of time bouncing between Steps 2 and 3, which gets confusing when I unearth a series of old pieces that need to be finished or expanded. These pieces live in this ambiguous “Revising” phase that lives outside this process, and I’m having a devil of a time trying to address them within my cycle.
Most of my time is spent in phases 2 and 3, although most of my Phase 3 time seems to spent for other people lately. Being a freelance editor/proofreader takes up substantially more time than I expected, but I really do enjoy the work. Some days, I even enjoy it more than the writing itself. Some days, though, I write and hope I’ll never, ever have to edit.
It’s not just a process cycle. It’s really a mood cycle, too! I suppose that’s part of why I enjoy it so much!
Posted by Ceara as Uncategorized at 7:37 AM EST
No Comments »
I read this interesting post on defining the persona in historical writings last week. It was fascinating.
When we look at something written by people long dead, we tend to read it within this filter that this writing is representative of the person, the period, the region. We know that people can often write the opposite of what they feel in modern society, so why do we assume these ancient people are any different?
It’s an interesting discussion, and I’ll be interested to see what comes of it.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:01 AM EST
No Comments »
I think the reason I love writing and voice acting is because I’m realizing they both have certain things in common. For me, the big similarity is knowing what’s been and what’s coming, even when it isn’t on screen.
When I write, I tend to know how an alluded to scene would have played out. I know I have to understand what truncated lines would have been if they had beeney allowed to finish. (I also freely admit that i have truncated a line, simply because i knew the character had to say something, but didn’t know what they were saying.)
It turns out that actors have to face the same thing. (I focus on voice actors since I spend so much of my free time watching or listenting to animated pieces.) They have to know where a character just came from, even if it wasn’t mentioned. They have to believe they know where a character is headed when they leave the screen, even if it wasn’t mentioned. They have to know what their character was saying, even if they are cut off by another character.
I really hadn’t thought too much about it until recently. I was listening to an interview with voice actor Dan Green where he actually talks about having that kind of understanding and why it’s so useful in his profession. Now, I’m working on a piece, and that part of the interview actually plays through my mind as I’m constructing my scenes and dialogues. It’s just incredibly true of any situation where a scene is being created and played out.
If you want your work to be loved, you have to draw your audience in through believable background and foresight.
Posted by Rebecca as Resources at 8:07 AM EST
No Comments »
