Happy Birthday, Joseph Conrad!

HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS

Although author Joseph Conrad was born in Poland as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, he learned to speak and write in English in his twenties.

The fact that he learned how to write in the English language so late in life makes his command of the language, as seen in his stories, impressive.

Joseph Conrad is famous for his novella Heart of Darkness in which the narrator goes on a voyage to the jungles of Africa in the late 1800s in search of a man named Kurtz.

Below is the narrator’s description of a scene he comes upon. You can tell by the words and items he chooses in this description that what he finds next will not be nice:

A Strange Thing to Be Thankful For

HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS

When Corrie ten Boom was arrested with her family in February 1944 for helping Jews escape the Nazis, she and her sister were sent to the women’s section of a harsh concentration camp. There she found infestations of vermin: lice and fleas.

Instead of being angry about the vermin, she decided to thank God for them. Soon, she found out

What Is Happening in this Yosemite Photo?

HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS

Every so often, it’s fun to forget about essay writing.

Today, instead of learning some writers’ device or essay format, you get to write a story or a journal entry from a photograph.

Here’s the photo, taken in Yosemite National Park:

Good Pirate, Bad Pirate

HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS

Robert Louis Stevenson is the author of Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, Kidnapped, A Child’s Garden of Verses, the deliciously creepy The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde based on a real person, and much more. You can learn more about him here.

Pirate in disguise

In Treasure Island, young Jim Hawkins is warned to be on the lookout for and avoid “the seafaring man with one leg.” Yet when he meets a sailor with one leg named Long John Silver, Hawkins is not troubled. Why?

First, he’s had a letter from his friend the squire claiming that Long John Silver is a war veteran who lost his leg “in his country’s service.” Next, when he meets Silver for himself, Silver seems “clean and pleasant-tempered.” Here is the paragraph where Jim Hawkins meets the truly nasty Long John Silver who, at the moment, doesn’t seem so nasty:

Are You Ready for NaNoWriMo?

HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS

Are you ready for NaNoWriMo?

Would you like to be?

Write a Novel

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month in which people sign up to write a novel in the month of November. (They obviously are not the ones cooking the turkey. Just saying.)

You can read more about NaNoWriMo here and here. Both sites will show you how to organize your writing days and give you tips on how to begin and complete that novel.

Write a Picture Book

Or maybe you are more interested in writing a picture book. Do you remember a favorite picture book from your youth? Would you like to have some fun at creating fun titles for one? Storystorm encourages writers to “create 30 story ideas in 30 days.”

How to Convince an Audience: Opinion versus Persuasion

SHARON’S BLOG

You may be very good at expressing your opinions, especially when you want to change someone’s mind.

What you may not know is that if you truly want to change someone’s mind, you have to stop thinking about your opinion and start thinking about your audience.

This tutorial, with a free infographic to download, will show you very clearly the difference between writing an opinion and writing to persuade an audience.

Opinion versus Persuasion

Writing or expressing an opinion is all about what you like; convincing another person to do something is all about what they need to hear to be persuaded.

Here’s an infographic that shows the difference between writing an opinion and writing to persuade. After the infographic, I’ve included a short writing exercise you can do quickly. My writing class just did it, and they had fun sharing their ideas about alligators, snow leopards, snakes, and so forth.

Drones: Helpful Tools or Accidents Waiting to Happen?

The Bad News

A drone being flown by remote control by an amateur crashed into a skyscraper in Manhattan, reeled to the sidewalk below, and struck a man.

Worried tourists atop the Seattle Space Needle called police when a drone buzzed the Needle and then returned to a nearby hotel.

This article reports that a groom was hit with a flying UAV at his wedding, and one crashed into spectators at a sporting event.

Motherboard.com reports that the DJI Phantom, the most popular commercially available drone, is a

His Hands Were Bigger Than Shovels: Hyperbole

HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS

Hyperbole is a lot of fun to read and to write.

But what is it?

Hyperbole (hi PER bo lee) is exaggeration, as in “He was as hefty as a whale” or “Her whining voice so electrified the air that it knocked migrating geese off their course.” To read examples of this figure of speech, click here.

Just so you know, this figure of speech is also called a writer’s device and a literary device. And, just so you also know, “writer’s device” and “literary device” mean the same thing. The first is from the writer’s perspective; the latter is from the perspective of a student studying literature.

Here’s an example of hyperbole from Lee Child’s Personal in which he describes one of the bad guys:

Write a Story from an Animal’s Perspective

HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS

How do you write a story about Alaska before people arrived? You make animals the main characters, which is exactly what James A. Michener does in Alaska.

Michener creates Matriarch, a mammoth that is old enough to be the grandmother of many other mammoths. Through her eyes, we see the landscape and experience the early troubles of the area now known as Alaska.