You are familiar with topic sentences, how they come at the beginning of paragraphs and tell readers what the paragraph is all about.
But what if the topic sentence came at the end of the paragraph? And what if that paragraph described something from a story?
Here’s part of a paragraph from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Notice the topic sentence at the end of the description:
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In a story, clothing can be the author’s way of telling us what kind of character we’re reading about.
Judging real people by their clothing might not be too smart, but authors rely on readers to judge characters based on their characters’ clothing.
For instance, someone in a black leather jacket with a skull embroidered on the back and chains hanging from a pants pocket is going to be very different from someone in a light aqua-colored jacket carrying an umbrella with pink flowers on it. We make assumptions of people according to their appearance.
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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:
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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.
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:
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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.
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.
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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:
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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.
Here’s a passage from Alaska in which Matriarch first encounters . . . well, I think you’ll figure out what’s going on here:
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Let’s celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month by highlighting a short story by Colombian-born Gabriel García Márquez.
Many stories can be put into one of two categories when talking about how the ball gets rolling:
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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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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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