Secret rooms in movies and books promise excitement. How does one find the room? How does one enter? What could be hidden in this mysterious vault?
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is introduced to readers as being the result of an amazing find, a secret cache tucked away in the dusty, forgotten second floor of the custom house where Hawthorne worked for a while.
Here’s how he creates excitement for his narrator’s find and, therefore, the story:
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Note: This is part one of the Intro to Writing series. Find links to the other tutorials here.
What do you do when your teacher gives you a subject to write about, but that subject is too broad?
For instance, what if your teacher says, “Write about natural disasters”? Right off the bat, you know you are in trouble. That subject is too large; there are too many possibilities. It would take a few books to cover everything, and your essay is due in two days.
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How are humans the same? How are we different from each other?
Explore this subject with your students and children as they dig into humanity and learn one method of comparing and contrasting as well.
This prompt comes in the form of a short video. I smiled and laughed through it but found something deeply sad in it as well. How will your students react to the silent messages in it?
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Has your sports team ever lost a game? And did you write about it in a poem?
You didn’t?
Well, Ernest Thayer did in the now-famous poem “Casey at the Bat.” You can read the history of the poem and the poem itself here.
October 2 is National Poetry Day, and recently the theme was “Remembering,” in which amateur and famous poets write to remember a special moment or a meaningful time in their lives.
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“We don’t need to eat anyone who would run, swim, or fly away if he could.”
The topic of the food we eat can be very controversial, and actor James Cromwell’s quote puts us right in the middle of it.
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Do your students waste endless time erasing whole sentences? Do they become discouraged when they look at their rough drafts filled with arrows, illegible notes in the margins, and ugly lines of scratched-out writing?
Let’s save them the pain by teaching them these handy, easy-to-use proofreading marks.
I’ve watched students in my writing classes scratch out whole sentences and rewrite them. They draw lines through words. They burn up their papers and crumble their erasers just to change something.
This is totally unnecessary.
There’s an easier—and quicker—way to proofread that doesn’t require a lot of rewriting, which should be good news to our students.
This is the last in a series of tutorials on grammar. In this one, you and your students will learn how to use these helpful proofreading marks.
If you’re dying to know what the other grammar tutorials are about, click here for one on punctuation in dialog. (Tarzan and Jane help out on that one.) Click here if you yearn to know how to handle commas in compound sentences with coordinating conjunctions.
And click here for the hard-hitting exposé on where to put the comma, period, colon, or semicolon when using quotation marks. Here’s a tutorial on a question I suspect you’ve heard from your students about using question marks and exclamation points with end quotation marks (you know, do they go inside or outside?).
For the tutorial revealing the crazy fact that the word “everyone” is singular, click here. And to finally put to rest your students’ confusion about it’s/its, you’re/your, and others of that ilk, click here.
As with all the other tutorials, you get a super-duper package today: an infographic to teach the proofreading marks, an example of how to use them in a real paragraph, an exercise so students can fix someone else’s mistakes, and the answers.
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Yes, folks, September 25th is Comic Book Day!
“A day for good triumphing over evil, and for saving the damsel in distress, Comic Book Day is all about enjoying a good comic,” according to daysoftheyear.com.
The dialog in comic books has to be spot-on. It has to be clear, concise, exciting, and informative.
Dialog in comic books and in traditional books has three main purposes:
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This week’s grammar tutorial puts to rest some confusing words like “it’s” and “its.”
You can use the infographic below to teach your students about some confusing word usage. After that, there’s an exercise to reinforce the material with your students, and you’ll find the answers below the exercise.
Now, on to the tutorial . . .
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Do you have to write an essay?
Are you stuck for ideas?
Have no fear. Here’s a strange way to get ideas for essays: Use your initials.
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It is hard to believe, but the word “everyone” is singular.
It sounds as though it should include a lot of people; in fact, it should include everyone—and that sounds plural.
But “everyone” is in the list of singular indefinite pronouns, which are listed here: each, every, either, neither, no, one, no one, everyone, someone, anyone, nobody, everybody, somebody, anybody, nothing, everything, something, anything.
I grouped them by their endings: -one, -body, and -thing. You also could list most of them by their beginnings: no-, every-, some-, and any-.
This week’s blog, which is another in a series of grammar tutorials, includes the following:
