Every so often, I like to remind Brave Moms to clear the coffee table and put out something new. This is a great week for Easter egg dyes in a box, tickets to the zoo to see baby animals, seed packets to plant in the garden, or trays of pansies to pot.
Spice up the spring with something new to enjoy with your kids. Then make a journal or blog entry, send a note to Grandma or copy a poem about spring!
Some writing assignments are like jello molds. They expect the writer to pour the hot liquid of her thoughts into a shape and then cool those thoughts down so that they congeal into a pineapple, celery and raspberry gelatin ring. (Can you believe that celery is ever added to jello?!)
Time to ditch the jello mold approach to writing.
Start with original, quirky thoughts. Get them on paper.
Dig through those words to find the most interesting hook – the part of the writing that caught your attention – and move it to the top. Don’t worry if it’s explicit or if it is a “topic sentence.” Grab the reader’s attention. You can use an exaggerated comparison (like I did at the top), you can start with dialog, you can describe noises or action, you can even lead with a question. But please, never begin a writing assignment with the birth date of a famous person, or the statistics of the Civil War, or the export percentages of lumber from Maine.
Get me into the topic through my curiosity or my emotions and then, as an IV drip keeps a person on life support fed, drip the facts into the writing. Don’t make facts and numbers the center piece of your writing. Let them add flavor and support to your otherwise wonderful retelling or description of the event, process or person in question.
Don’t mistake encyclopedia writing for a model of good writing. Encyclopedias are designed to meet certain criteria. That criteria doesn’t include entertaining, persuading or involving the reader. So leave encyclopedias on the shelf. Instead, use quality non-fiction (found in the juvenile section of your local library) as models for good non-fiction writing. Not all of these books achieve the goals I’ve stated here, but many of them do, particularly the ones written in the last five years.
Break free from the mold and write to impact. You’ll be glad your kids did.
A little known writing element that does more to perk up writing than all your alliterative assertions is thorough knowledge of pop culture. Yes, you have to know stuff that everyone else knows and then you have to cook it into similes, metaphors and analogies with the speed of a microwave to hold your reader’s attention.
Some of you may immediately remind me that we’re writing essays, here. Come on Julie. How can you reference Taylor Hicks from American Idol in an expository essay? The sports page will show you how. You tell me that the following article doesn’t have a thesis and supporting points! Show me that Gene’s style doesn’t cause deeper insight and greater impact than the usual dry toast efforts of your average high school sophomore.
If your kids can handle language like this, we can certainly upgrade or downgrade the academic verbiage. Learn to fling words like rice at a wedding and you’ll be on your way to great writing in any format.
And now, because UCLA is in the final two and I’m a UCLA Bruin alum, I give you GREAT writing from ESPN. 🙂 Count the metaphors and weep!
(From: ESPN.com)
INDIANAPOLIS — If you love watching sweat dry, C-SPAN and the 12-disc DVD series on the history of Baroque Period painting, you’ll love watching a replay of UCLA squeezing the Final Four life out of LSU.
The Bruins don’t simply play defense, they roll you in bubble wrap, apply duct tape and send you home in an overnight package. It’s about as sexy as Billy Packer in a Speedo, but it works. Gawd, does it work.
LSU isn’t exactly Ole Miss, though the Tigers did miss a lot of shots Saturday evening at the RCA Dome. LSU won the SEC title, sent the AP Player of the Year J.J. Redick to the bench crying during its win against Duke in the regional semis, and then beat Texas to reach Indianapolis. But then UCLA gets a hold of the Tigers and turns them into cat chow, 59-45.
Remember that scene in “Titanic,” when what’s-her-face lets go of Leonardo DiCaprio and he slips into the darkness of the icy sea? That was LSU. And the Bruins were the ones who tied cement Nikes to the Tigers’ ankles.
As the UCLA lead grew as though it were on Creatine, LSU coach John Brady and his assistants could only lean back in their blue folding chairs and shake their heads. Those Tiger team huddles during timeouts must have been keepers.
Brady: “Uh …”
Actually, Brady did what he could with the grease pen and board during the T.O.s, but there aren’t many 21-point plays you can call. And there’s only so many times you can yell, “Let’s go!” — as Brady did at the end of those timeouts — before it doesn’t matter anymore.
It got so bad that the refs almost had to stop the game to ice down the bruise marks on LSU’s rims. The Tigers weren’t much of a perimeter team to begin with, but UCLA turned them into bricklayers.
The Bruins put the glove on LSU so tight that the Tigers missed 34 of 50 shots (32 percent). They also shot a sparkling zero percent from the 3-point line (0-for-6). Even when there was no one guarding them, the Tigers couldn’t make a thing. Try 13-for-28 from the foul line.
“I thought our intensity defensively for the entire 40 minutes was really, really incredible,” said UCLA coach Ben Howland. “That’s the best defense we’ve played all year.”
After a while, the only question was whether the Tigers could break the 40-point mark. They did, with 1:22 remaining. Free tacos for everyone!
UCLA ought to issue a commemorative instructional video after this one. If the Bruins are this stingy against Florida in Monday night’s championship game (Big difference: the Gators can actually shoot the rock), then UCLA wins its 12th Final Four.
“We didn’t show up and they did,” said LSU guard Ben Voogd. “It’s plain and simple.”
The Bruins’ defense makes grown men cry. LSU senior guard Darrel Mitchell was in full tear mode as early as 4:29 left to play. You’d cry too if your career ended in a blowout and you shot 3-for-9.
LSU’s Glen “Big Baby” Davis was weep-free and, as it turned out, almost impact free. The Bruins’ tag team of bigs (Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, Ryan Hollins, Alfred Aboya, Lorenzo Mata) held Big Baby to 14 points — and it took him 17 shots and 10 free throw attempts to reach double digits.
Davis, as likeable a player as there is in the Tournament, couldn’t hide his frustration as the game progressed. When Brady pulled him for a breather midway through the second half, UCLA’s fans began chanting, “Change. . . his. . . diaper.” Davis draped a towel over his head.
And when he made a put-back with 8:28 left in the game, Davis muttered, “About time.”
This is what happens when you play a UCLA team where every player seemingly has four arms. The Bruins held Memphis to a season-low 45 points in the regional final, and then held the Tigers to a season-low 45. UCLA owns the nation’s longest win streak (12), which figures. Opponents are averaging just 53.9 points in those 12 consecutive Bruins victories.
It isn’t hard to tell when UCLA’s defense begins to have an effect.
“[Opposing teams] don’t do the things they normally do,” said Bruins point guard Jordan Farmar.”They’re looking at each other, pointing fingers. Sometimes their eyes get real big, like a deer in the headlights, like they don’t know what hit them.”
LSU played hard, but UCLA played harder. And better. Plus, they actually know how to hit a jump shot at times.
In the end, UCLA’s defense was the difference. It always is with the Bruins.
Now back to our regularly schedule C-SPAN programming.
Gene Wojciechowski is the senior national columnist for ESPN.com. You can contact him at [email protected].
The last year has been an odyssey for me. If some of you recall, Noah decided not to have a graduation or party or anything resembling the end of high school. It was like our homeschool era together just petered out. I was devastated.
It was hard.
Harder still was facing the real facts: this kid is not going to college.
I stalled that fact by enrolling him in my New Testament Greek class at Xavier. Noah showed interest in learning Greek (loves dead languages) and had to do the enrolling himself (college rules) so I knew he was up for it. We had a marvelous time each week listening to lectures and discussing on the way home. We had a less marvelous time with my ambivalence about how fully he participated. I tried so hard to stay out of his homework etc. but I didn’t always succeed.
I’ve had lots of conversations online about education, college, and unschooling with lots of chances to re-evaluate what we’ve chosen to do with our kids. There have been many voices saying that we must require our kids to prepare for college because they won’t make it without college.
I bought into those voices for years because I believed so completely in the importance of college to one’s future success… which is why I was often hard on Noah.
But something happened in the last few months that has altered how I see. Noah, on the day of the final for Greek said, “I woke up this morning realizing Greek was ending today and I thought, ‘Phew, now I can learn Greek.'”
Lightbulb moment.
This is a kid for whom learning is everything… not someone else’s schedule, not someone else’s idea. He loves to learn, at his pace, with his interests leading him. And learn he does! Just last night he went to Barnes and Noble for three hours to work on Klingon. Why? For fun.
He spends his money on books like Liddell Scott’s Greek lexicon, Semantics and constructed languages. He moderates an email list where the list members are creating a language from scratch, voting on things like word order structure and alphabets.
Two weeks ago, he began researching linguistics programs in colleges. He discovered that one of the best ones in the country is right here in Cincinnati. He’s contemplating whether he is ready to go to college, but is now sincerely interested according to his time table, not mine.
I’ve had to learn (along with the rest of you) that my child is not a product to be created but a life to be respected.
It’s been such an amazing year of revelation – to see my oldest know enough about who he is that he resisted being conformed to my vision for his life. Instead, he keeps chipping away at what he loves and has become more and more clear about what he’d like to do about it.
I feel so lucky to be in on that journey.
Just thought I’d share in case it might help some of you with younger teens so you don’t wring your hands as much as I did.
Comments are open.
I spent the weekend with a group of online friends I’ve had for the past eight years. We get together every 18 months or so for an “in-person” retreat.
I sat cuddled up in a blanket on the sofa taking in these faces that I don’t know as well as I do their typing styles. I thought back to the many hours I’ve spent reading their words, my only link to who they are.
The first time we met, they came to my house. There were thirteen of us and I had only ever met in person two of them. The rest had not met each other. We’d been prolific online sharing our thoughts, the things we were learning and even our personal lives. Yet for thirty minutes after they arrived, we were surprisingly quiet. Each of us simply stared at the faces we hadn’t imagined, taking in voices and mannerisms, noticing details like the color of earrings and shoe choices.
After that initial silence, the weekend flew by in a blur of words and laughter. We enjoyed it so much, we’ve continued the tradition about every eighteen months. And that’s what dawned on me on the couch in Baton Rouge Saturday night.
These women who I see very infrequently, I know very deeply because we all write posts on a bulletin board. One of our number writes in English as her second language! She speaks Spanish as her native tongue and yet she’s forged ahead in English online to make connections. Whether trained in writing or simply interested in learning, each one of these women discovered that her writing was important enough, successful enough, interesting enough to sustain friendships over eight years time without face-to-face contact.
And that struck me as the height of brave writing!
Another moment where I wanted to thank God for the Internet and the way it’s enriched my life and opened the world to writing in a whole new and relevant way.
