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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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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I understand at the outset of this article that the word “them” in my title is ambiguous. Does it stand for the writers or for the ideas?
As you can see, writing is hard. At least, that’s what students tell me.
It makes their hands hurt. They don’t know where to begin. They don’t know how to construct paragraphs. If they’re not interested in the topic, they can’t think of anything to write anyway.
The list goes on and on and is pretty much the same in all the classes I teach.
A number of moms confess to me that they’ve given up teaching writing. Some say that whenever they give their students writing assignments, crying is involved. (I assume it’s the students doing the crying, but I could possibly be wrong about that.)
Even in the weekly writing class I teach for high school homeschoolers, at least two students have
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Are you encountering resistance when you ask your students to write?
Is there crying involved?
It is intimidating for students to stare down a blank piece of paper or an empty computer screen. Middle and high school students have revealed to me why they are negative about writing. Here’s what they have to say:
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I have a secret to tell you.
I’m not really sure I should. After all, it feels a little like a chef revealing the secret ingredient to a closely guarded family recipe, but I’m going to share it with you anyway.
As you may know, I create many writing prompts and wrote the daily writing prompts for SchoolhouseTeachers.com for over two years. That’s a lot of writing and a lot of prompts.
Where do I get my ideas? Here’s my secret:
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Do you want to influence your readers? Do you want to grab their hearts?
Use the power of story.
There are two kinds of stories: the true ones and the fictional ones. People have been using both kinds forever, and so can you.
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I am sickened and saddened by the news that Planned Parenthood is dealing in baby parts. I imagine you are troubled as well.
Whether they are truly selling them or, as they say, making them available, there is no defense for these actions.
This exposé is an organic teaching moment for us and our teens. How can we help our teens understand what is godly and debunk the “humanitarian” argument?
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One of the first rules story writers learn is this: Show, don’t tell.
What does that mean? Check out the following examples to see what I mean.
When you write a story, try not to tell your readers what your character is feeling, like this:
Jeremy was angry.
Instead, show your character in action, like this:
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In a recent tutorial, you practiced plunging your character into hot water with two powerful methods many writers use. You can find that prompt here.
This week you’ll examine three more methods of getting your main character deep into a story. As Stanley Elkin reveals, “I would never write about someone who is not at the end of his rope.”
You have an idea for a story but don’t know how to get it going. Or you would like to write a story but are out of ideas.
When you write a story, you have to throw a lot of things at your main character, things he or she would rather not have to deal with. In this prompt, you’ll learn two proven methods to get ideas and plunge your character into hot water. In this prompt, you’ll explore three more.
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