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I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend a useful website. I read it in feed form, and I have yet not to find an entry useful!
If you’re serious about growing as a writer, start reading this site!
Posted by Ceara as Writing Prompts, Resources at 7:58 AM EDT
If anyone wants to do something nice for me, please order this book for me.
The title is based on the punch line of a very old joke about a panda who walks into a bar, orders a sandwich, and then opens fire on the place after he’s finished eating. He tells the owner to look up “panda” in the dictionary, where the definition includes, “eats, shoots, and leaves”. It’s long been a favorite joke of mine (Honestly, who doesn’t love a good panda joke!), but over the past several months, it’s become a horrifying truth.
Most people are afraid of punctuation. They aren’t sure when to use anything but a period or a question mark. They’re so embarrassed by this that they never think to ask for help. I know this because I have spent the past several months of my life grading, editing, directing students in editing activities, and teaching grammar.
Punctuation, believe it or not, was actually intended to make communication simpler. Its entire goal was to clarify the written word so it could be more widely understood. It was not meant to frustrate the human race into complete idiocy.
Consider the panda joke above. With random commas thrown in everywhere, it would appear that the panda is violent when its stomach is full. What if the author of that entry had read over his words before sumitting them? It probably would have looked like “eats shoots and leaves”. As someone with a folder full of adorables picture of pandas eating bamboo shoots, I think it’s safe to say that you’d be more likely to see this than the above image.
If you ever find yourself uncertain, just read the sentence aloud to yourself the way you have it written, or have someone read it to you. My students love this activity because it shows them what punctuation is necessary, and helps them see why. Most of them enjoy a hearty laugh at their own work during this part of the editing process.
Punctuation can help you say exactly what you meant to say. It can also leave your reader completely bewildered if misapplied. Do yourself a favor and make a habit of trying to use better punctuation in your writing!
And order yourself a copy of that book when you order one for me!
Posted by Rebecca as Resources at 8:22 AM EDT
I spend an unwholesome amount of my day editing or guiding others in editing activities. As such, I have to remember all those lovely grammar rules drilled into my head in middle school. Now that I’m considering writing my own writing guide and grammar book, I really have to be on top of these things.
I found these non-rules very interesting. Expecially the one about conjunctions. I don’t know about anyone else, but I was taught that you never start a sentence with a conjunction because they are connecting words. At the beginning of a sentence, you aren’t really connecting anything. The rule about split infinitives is interesting, too. I’d never really thought to connect it to Latin.
The next time you go to scold someone about a grammar rule, consider the concept behind it. Is it still a valid style preference?
Posted by Ceara as Resources at 7:58 AM EDT
I was praised throughout school for being able to write at an advanced level. I took a great deal of pride in that fact. I still do, actually.
When I started preparing training materials and teahcing guides to go out to people I would never have contact with, I knew I had to start dialing back on my wriitng. Simpler sentence structure. Less complex vocabulary choices. I was going to have to make my writing accessible to the average person.
LifeHacker recently offered a link to an online readability test. You give it a URL, and it gives you the readability score from three major readability tests.
Naturally, I ran a number of my sites through it. I ran blogs, stories, anytihng I could think of thorugh it. It turns out that I have attained my goal of writing at an accessible level. The average person can, indeed, read any of my work and walk away understanding it. This warms my heart. What killed me, though, was realizing that my once very advanced writing style has become a low-level writing style.
I’m having to remind myself constantly that this is a good thing, and it’s not how I would write if I were writing something that didn’t need to be widely readable. I have to remind myself that writing on a more conversational level is what helps my students, my readers, and my editors understand me. This is a good thing, and I should see it as an accomplishment instead of as a setback.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:12 AM EDT
I think I’ve spent more time over the past week reading about how to clean up your writing for various situations (mostly online). One of my weaknesses is writing copy. Another is the fact I really don’t understand the difference between content and copy.
To aid in furthering my understanding (or clearing up my misunderstanding, as it were), I was quite delighted to find this online guide to copywriting. When I put together my personal learning plan, this is definitely going to be a part of it! It breaks copywriting down and explores different aspects of it!
I’ll aso be reading and reviewing this great article from A List Apart on the need for web designers to be good writers. Again, this is just an excellent resource!
Posted by Ceara as Resources at 7:53 AM EDT
I absolutely love the idea of deliberately writing a book with errors in it! There are so many potential uses for this kind of book in every discipline!
I remember in middle school our algebra teacher was friends with the man who wrote our textbook. Apparently, his editors and fact-checkers had all missed his book, because we kept finding errors. She would present our errors to him when they would meet for dinner, and he would never cease to be amazed by what we’d find.
The really interesting part is how many of those errors would never have been caught if we weren’t learning the math well. It almost became a teaching motivator. If we learned the skill correctly, we’d have a better chance of finding the errors in that section. It almost made math fun.
Almost.
I could see this idea still appealing to kids today. They love to find mistakes made by adults! It makes them feel smart!
Honestly, if it makes a kid feel smart and helps them learn, then I’m willing to make a mistake or eight.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:42 AM EDT
I’m discovering all sort sof interesting places lately.
The first is YouWriteOn.com, which is run by the Arts Council of England to develop better writers. It is fortuantely open to other countries. I haven’t been brave enough to submit anythign yet, but I am trying to review people. Really, it’s been excellent for building up my confidence in reviewing others’ works, and their review system is pretty nice!
The second I’m going to have to spend some time with. It’s this interesting little site on writnig copy. Once upon a time, I used to be good at writing copy. Ever since I started working on novels and short stories, though, my copywriting ability has found itself in a handbasket.
There’s a writing workshop here in the library on Fridays, too. I missed today’s, but I am hoping to attend the rest of the month!
Posted by Ceara as Resources at 7:36 AM EDT
My mother loves to share a story about my father from his school days. He’d written a paper that he was invited to read to the class. After reading what he’d intended to write (Shakespeare wrote his sonnets to make his lover immortal.), the teacher asked him to read exactly what was on the paper. My father, a very detail-oriented person, had managed to leave a critical letter out of a certain word.
Keep in mind, this predated spell check, so he couldn’t blame it on anybody but himself.
I bring this up because this is something I often harp on my students about. We aren’t fortunate enough to have someone or something read our work back to us, but I do ask my students to step into a side room and read their work out loud to themself when they think they’ve finished editing. It’s amazing how not a single one comes back from that not wanting to make edits.
I’m the same way in my own writing. I spend a lot of my time, both while writing and editing, reading sentences out loud to myself to make sure I’m saying what I think I’m saying.
It’s probably more useful to have a fresh set of eyes read your work out loud to you, but this is definiely one you can do on your own!
Posted by Rebecca as Resources at 8:10 AM EDT
I’ve had the great fortune over the past week to stumble across some rather interesting writing prompts.
The first was shown to me by someone responding to my work on FictionPress.com. Her teacher had them randomly select several numbers, and then create a poem where each line had the number of syllables prescribed for that line. For example, let’s say I chose the series 2475656, then the first line would have two syllables, the second would have four, and so on.
The second and third came together in this post on encreasing your creativity: riff on opening lines and play photo finish. I think both of these suggestions are great ideas as writing prompts.
Posted by Ceara as Writing Prompts at 8:05 AM EDT