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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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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It’s that time of year again! The time when people around the world cluster in forums (when the site works), IRC channels, and coffee shops and start talking about word count goals and debate over whether or not to plot.
Yes, it’s time to sign up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)!
What is NaNoWriMo? It’s best described as a pure writing frenzy. From November 1 to November 30, you write a novel of at least 50,000 words. It’s a great chance to just sit down and write that novel you’ve always been meaning to!
The best part is that because of the tight deadline, you have absolutely no time to fret over the imperfections of your first draft (Just an FYI, first drafts are supposed to be bad and imperfect.) You can sit and write. You can plan. You can just sit down and write. It’s all about you and the writing.
It’s a great exercise, one that you seriously should consider doing, if for no other reason than to say, “I’ve written a novel.” No one has to know you haven’t edited it yet.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:09 AM EDT
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I’ve spent the past two months submerged in writing books, and I think I can safely say that there are some truly frightening books out there (some of which come highly recommended by respected writers). Many of them agree on a number things, but they all conflict on a wide majority of things as well.
It’s enough to make a girl’s head nearly explode.
I got through James Bonnet’s book and his stirring speech on why the act-scene structure was anathema to good story structure. That was fun, because nearly everyone else (including books on good presentation design) has proven why act-scene structure is a good story backbone, and many of them have even made the three-act structure look like a great starting place for learning how to lay out a captivating story.
I actually swore off reading another writing book at that point, and then remembered I still had Writing for Comics with Peter David sitting on my to-read shelf. Now, I have loved David’s writing since I was in high school. To this day, my favorite Star Trek: the Next Generation books have nearly all been written by him, and I own all the Sir Apropos books, and am slowly working my way through the Arthur books. Needless to say, I’m a bit of a fan.
Writing for Comics with Peter David is actually a writing book any fiction writer should read, regardless of what they’re trying to write. While his examples all come from his comic book writing experience, his advice is broad enough to cover comic books and fiction novels (both of which he has extensive experience in writing). He also includes a number of writing exercises (a coupole of which may be playing a part in my writing very shortly).
And he supports the three-act structure, too!
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:38 AM EDT
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As a five-time participant (three-time winner) in National Novel Writing Month, I can tell you that silencing your inner editor is the best thing you can do for your writing. In fact, NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty’s No Plot, No Problem has this fantastic button in the book that says, “Take My Inner Editor,” along with its partner, “Give Me Back My Inner Editor,” toward the end of the book.
Yes, during the month of November, my inner editor goes on walkabout while I agonize over putting 50,000 words in a semi-coherent fashion onto a document.
During the rest of the year, my inner editor has this bad habit of looking over my shoulder while I write (or do anything creative, actually). He reminds me that I have Syrus Truesdale out of character, or that Joey Wheeler would never say something I’ve made him say. He’s positive my darling Kazuki isn’t nearly as angsty as I portray him. (Actually, that much is true. Kaz is worse, but I don’t do angst well.) My inner editor is also hugely critical of Dead Bunny. Apparently, a combination of text and images will not actually make sense to some poor struggling math student out there. I really have to ignore him some days just to get my work done, usually by placating him, “Let me get this done, and then I’ll let you have your way with it,” or, “I don’t need it to be perfect. I need it to be out of my head.”
That second one is true. No first draft should ever be expected to be perfect. It’s the chance to write down what you’re thinking. The editing stage, where you beat your idea into something pretty, should be its own separate activity. I almost have my inner editor convinced of this. He still drops in while I’m working, though.
My inner editor is a real jerk, come to think of it. I’m glad to be rid of him every November!
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:38 AM EDT
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Occasionally at work, I get to work with the academic writing students. For a while, in the course of my lead instructor duties, I was constantly being asked to work with these students while they were trying to map out their compare/contrast essays. In the vast majority of these cases, the student was writing about a pair of cartoons, video games, or science fiction movies, so I was really being called over to help draw information out of the student. However, it ended up leading to my helping guide the student’s map.
For me, the compare/contrast essay is about telling what specific ways two things are different, and then identifying how they are similar. For example, using one of the students’ essays as an example (and this is only on my mind at the moment because I spent too much time with one of the cartoons and the spin-off of the other cartoon this weekend. It’s fresh in my brain.), if you say that the monsters in Pokemon are carried around in Pokeballs, then you have to say something similar about the monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh. You can’t set up a good contrast if you just give random facts about both. It’s ahrd for your reader to understand why you’re comparing them at all without the specific details of what’s being contrasted.
I got to talking with a colleague of mine a couple of weeks ago, an absolutely brilliant writing teacher, and he was telling me about his views on the compare/contrast essay. He’s very traditional, and that’s his greatest strength, but in that he views the compare/contrast essay as a non-essay because it covers two topics- the two things being compared. Instead, he encourages the student to write and essay on one of the topics, with a paragraph on why the other topic isn’t like the main topic.
I got to thinking about that, and it’s an interesting approach. Given my mindset, I’m not sure how successfully I can apply that to my own teaching of that essay type, but I might have to think about how much my own style already incorporates that .
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:02 AM EDT
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Before anyone worries, I haven’t suddenly decided to take up screenwriting. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting was recommended to me because I’ve been working on scripts for math video tutorials and a graphic novel, and I can understand why it was recommended to me.
Through examples from the same seven movies (I now never have to watch Chinatown thanks to this book!), Syd Field covers the basic layout of a screenplay, and then offers suggestions and tips for how to develop an industry-standard screenplay. For those aspiring to sell their screenplays, there is even a chapter dedicated to doing just that!
I took a lot of notes on structure and the role of the writer in the script. Much of what Field covers can be used by writers creating just about anything. You just have to tweak bits of the paradigm to make it work. I’m already looking at how to apply some of the advice to the graphic novel script. His revising suggestions will also help me as I tackle the two oversized editing jobs sitting in my to-do list (one of which people have been asking me about, the other one should apparently go gather a pile of rejection letters).
If you write, regardless of what you write, you should thumb through this one. (Me? After I finish the three books on my shelf, I should ban myself from reading another writing book.)
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:08 AM EDT
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Yesterday, I wrote about creating clear instructions over on EducationNiche. Today, I’d like to use this post to remind you why you need to write clear instructions.
Whenever you write out a document explaining how to do something, you need to remember that you’re writing with the intention to have someone follow your directions. It’s like the old camp game where you have to get someone to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without telling them that’s what they’re making.
Remember that another person will be following your instructions without you standing right there. This means you need to make sure everything makes sense to someone else. Without anyone else around, I’ve actually tried to follow my own directions step by step to see if I’ve left anything out. It’s much better if you can have someone who has never done what you’re trying to explain try to follow your directions.
The important point here is that a person will be following your directions. You more than likely won’t be there. The language needs to be simple, free of jargon. There needs to be plenty of white space for contrast. Images can be useful when used correctly. And a living, breathing human being will trying to interpret your writing!
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:15 AM EDT
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I’ve decided to tackle two of Lorelle on WordPress’ blogging challenges at the same time and talk about why I blog and maybe a little bit of how I blog
Lorelle’s first challenge is to describe blogging. Sounds simple enough. Except we aren’t allowed to say, “Blogging is typing thoughts on a topic into a text editor that will post those thoughts onto website via the blogging engine of your choice.” I’m fine with that, actually, because it really doesn’t describe what I’m doing right now. Honestly, blogging is about writing about something important to you. It’s thinking about what you’re reading or doing and writing about it. It’s about finding a cool bit of information and preserving it for future reference. It’s about exploring a favorite hobby, or learning about something new. Occasionally, it’s even about actually teaching.
Simply put, blogging is what you bring to it. If you bring to it a thirst for knowledge, then you’ll come away having learned something. If you bring to it a desire to understand something better, you’ll walk away with a new insight into that topic. If you bring to it a desire to just get your thoughts down somewhere, you’ll find a sense of rejuvenation. If you bring to it a desire for instant fame…well…you’ll either find yourself receiving a level of notoriety you didn’t want, or you’ll burn out quickly when you realize it’s not that simple.
The cool part about being a blogger is that you get to combine a wide array of skills, skills I happen to enjoy using. You get to read and do some research while you’re either fact-checking or diving deeper into something. You get to write. You can choose to learn as you hand code your HTML or LaTex into your posts. If you aren’t super shy like me, you can hold conversations in your comments and build relationships with like-minded people. You get to explore, not only the topic, but yourself as well. What is this topic? Why is it important to me?
Lorelle’s second challenge is to describe what you need for blogging. I’m a pretty lightweight blogger. My job and my schedule pretty much leave me blogging at home, so I type away on my stationary laptop. I do keep a notebook on me at work for those flashes of inspiration. Other than that, I use Google Reader and EverNote to find interesting information or inspiration and start organizing resources. I’m a fairly simple blogger, I guess.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:12 AM EDT
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