Let’s talk about trees.
Something interesting just happened to you. Right now. This moment.
When you read “trees,” an image of a tree or trees popped into your head. What was it?
When you write to describe something, you want to be specific. You DON’T want to write like this:
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In the mid-1800s, Samuel Morse helped create a code that was used in his new system of communication: telegraphs.
You may be familiar with the Morse code for “SOS”:
· · · ― ― ― · · ·
(or “dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot”).
The three dots stand for “S” and the three dashes stand for “O.”
In Frank Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey’s memoir Cheaper by the Dozen,
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Do you want to time travel?
What was it like when your ancestors first set foot on American soil? What did the Egyptian pyramids look like when they were first built, gleaming with layers of gold?
How did Jesus perform the miracle of healing the ten lepers? When you are twenty years old, what will the world be like?
One famous scientist, Stephen Hawking, believed people can time travel if they
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Reading descriptions can be super boring; you probably skip them when you read older books, especially if they go on and on.
Today’s writers know how to capture your attention and keep the descriptions interesting. What are their secrets? We’ll explore two today.
First, they use their senses. Here’s a fascinating verse about Jesus that the apostle John writes in the beginning of his first letter:
“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (I John 1:1 NIV)
How many senses from the list below does he depend on to tell us that Jesus is real?
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This week is Holy Week for Christians. We remember and celebrate Jesus’ Triumphal Entry, Last Supper, trial, death, and resurrection.
All the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) have accounts of the resurrection, but none of the accounts are written in first person.
First-person point of view is when the narrator is telling the story, like this: “I saw the angels,” “I walked up to the tomb,” or “When we saw that it was empty, he went in and I backed away.”
The disciple John, when mentioning himself, writes of himself in third person as “the other disciple,” like this: “So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first” (John 20: 3-4). What would his story be like if he had written it in first person?
Many people are mentioned in the accounts of the resurrection: Mary Magdalene and other women, guards, angels, disciples such as Peter and John, chief priests, Cleopas and the other man walking to Emmaus, and Doubting Thomas. What story could they tell?
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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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Everyone has stuff they don’t like doing or stuff that creeps them out.
That’s true for Howie Mandel, comedian and former host of the TV show Deal or No Deal. He hates shaking hands with people because of all the germs he can get from one handshake. Now he uses a fist bump.
“I do it because it just uses the outside of my hand. I can do it and still hold a sandwich. But when I get home,
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Some people believe they’re boring. They have no story to tell. They’ve done nothing interesting.
But a wise man named Ryter thinks they’re wrong.
In Rodman Philbrick’s The Last Book in the Universe, old man Ryter is talking to the young teen Spaz, the main character. Here’s what Ryter says to him:
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Dr. Seuss’s real name is Theodor Seuss Geisel, and he’s the author of The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, Horton Hears a Who, and many other books.
A commemorative postage stamp, which you see here, was issued by the United States in 2004 on the anniversary of his 100th birthday.
And now, more than a quarter of a century after his death, Dr. Seuss was published again! The complete manuscript and sketches for What Pet Should I Get? was found in an old box and was published in 2015. It became a #1 New York Times Bestseller!
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`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
What?!
That’s the first verse of the poem “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. You can read the whole crazy poem by clicking here.
Surprisingly, if you read the whole poem, you really can tell what is going on, despite all the new words.
Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice in Wonderland stories, enjoyed making up words, as you can tell by his poem. In fact, one of the words he concocted for this poem is a word we still use today:
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