I was shopping one day last week when I heard an elderly woman say to her daughter, “I’d like to find a white sweater.”
Her daughter came back with, “Oh, Mother, you always do this to me. You know we can’t find white after Labor Day.”
I thought, Hmm. That daughter is having trouble with her mother.
A few minutes later, in the same store, I heard a 30-something granddaughter talking with her elderly grandmother. “Oh, Grandma,” she said,
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“You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage
to lose sight of the shore.” –Christopher Columbus
When an author wants to let readers know that a character is, say, courageous, she doesn’t write, “Chris was courageous.” Instead, she sets up a situation in which the character has to act bravely, even if he or she feels fearful, showing just how courageous the character is.
Christopher Columbus showed courage by doing something—crossing an ocean when many believed he would fall off the edge of the earth into oblivion.
“Show, don’t tell” is an important element of writing stories. You don’t want to insult your readers by telling them how characters feel or what a character is like. You want to show them by
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Many students tell me that after they do the hard work of coming up with an idea, they do not know what to put in the paragraph or even how to write the paragraph.
Is this an issue for you as well? Could you use a little help in this area?
{Looking for the MIDDLE SCHOOL version of this tutorial? >>}
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You’re writing your essay and everything’s going great until you realize you need to let readers know where you got a certain fact. You aren’t using a bibliography, footnotes, or works cited page because this is just an essay, not a report or research paper.
You don’t want to plagiarize. Putting someone else’s fact or idea in your essay without any citation would definitely be plagiarism.
What are you going to do?
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Once in a while, it’s interesting to look at a picture and write whatever comes to your mind—no guidance, no rules.
So, here goes . . .
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Proofreading. What a pain.
You finish your essay and think you’re through with it, but, no. Now you have to proofread it.
It turns out that writing and proofreading are two separate skills. In fact, they use two different parts of your brain and should be done at different times.
To take this a step further, when I proofread, I
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Students will follow along as I guide them through my experience with making stained-glass butterflies. As they read, they’ll be learning how to write a how-to and then insert transitions into the essay to move their readers easily through the process.
Suitable for students in 5th – 12th grade.
Last week I attended a class on how to make stained-glass butterflies. You know, the kind you hang up on a window with little suction cups.
My stained-glass butterfly and my mom’s. Hers turned out better than mine!
The teacher was very clear on how to do each step. We practiced cutting glass first, listening for the “hiss” that showed we were scoring the glass correctly with our cutters. After we had cut a line and a circle (both of which I messed up), he moved us to the next step.
I chose what I thought would be a simple butterfly design and found out how wrong I was.
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Across the country, nearly 1 out of every 4 high school students is dropping out, according to boostup.org.
Here are some statistics about dropouts. I was the most surprised by #11. That post mentions a “dropout factory.” You’ll find the definition of that term here, along with other facts about dropping out of school.
Why do you think students drop out of high school? Here are some interesting reasons, according to the students who are dropping out.
Do you think they should stay in school and graduate? After all, David Karp, founder of Tumblr, dropped out of high school
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Do you know someone who does not or cannot speak?
Many reasons exist for someone not speaking. For instance, someone may be afraid to speak and be an elective mute. Some may have been born with physical problems that make it difficult or impossible to speak. Others may have lost the ability to speak due to an illness, which is what happened to Don. You can watch his story here.
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I find writing prompts in the most unusual places, and this week’s prompt is no exception.
Have you ever eaten at a Fazoli’s restaurant? Their slogan is “Real Italian. Real Fast.” They may have the best breadsticks on the planet.
Their cups and breadstick papers are covered with sayings. I found this one on a cup with about ten one-liners like “Mom is not synonymous with waitress”:
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