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A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Thoughts from my home to yours

Archive for the ‘Grammar’ Category

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Bad Analogies

A friend sent me these in email and they made me laugh so much I had to share them.

Analogies and metaphors supposedly found in high school essays:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge free ATM.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

26. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

27. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

28. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

Posted in General, Grammar | Comments Off on Bad Analogies

Grammar, Spelling, and Word Games

These require no preparation. Just pick one and get started! No more grammar, vocabulary and spelling guilt.

  1. Over breakfast, identify the parts of speech for every action you perform and item you use. Stump each other, if you can. I chowed the chow while chewing. (Chowed: verb, Chow: noun, Chewing: gerund)
  2. Grab a stack of magazines or books and thumb through them until you find a word you don’t know. Look it up and use it in a sentence. (You can make this a game by suggesting that everyone do it at the same time and then share the word at teatime. See if anyone knows what it means and how to use it before the “expert” teaches them what it is.)
  3. Turn nouns into verbs: I chaired the meeting, I tabled the discussion, I forked over the money, I couched my words in apologies…
  4. Look up the name of a bird and then memorize its Latin name. See if there is a relationship between the Latin and the English. Look it up online and see if you can find out what the Latin means.
  5. Make a word scramble. Everyone picks five words, scrambles the spellings and then passes the list of scrambled words to the right. Set the timer for three minutes. Unscramble as quickly as you can. When the bell rings, pass the list to the right again. Reset the timer and go. Keep going until every word is unscrambled. Work with your neighbor if your list is finished. The goal isn’t to win, but for the entire group to unscramble every single word.

Posted in Games, Grammar | Comments Off on Grammar, Spelling, and Word Games

Do your kids love sports?

Sweet dunk

Word games are a great way to learn about grammar. Kids especially bond to language when it’s clever or funny or about one of their passions!

The following grammar game idea comes from Brave Writer mom, Christine. She’s got boys who are crazy about sports. You might try something similar with any interest your child has. Simply find the appropriate literature (video game reviews, ballet magazine, quilting manual, cookbook). Thanks, Christine!

Grammar Game

1. Take the sports page and ask your kids to each pick an article. Read and enjoy bits of it together.

2. Next, have them circle all the verbs they can find.

3. Ask how many “to be” (state of being) verbs are used then note how many are action words.

4. Talk about the word pictures the verbs evoke. For instance, what mental images come to mind when they read words like “edged” or “squashed” or “tackled”?

5. Lastly, discuss why the writer might have chosen the verbs he or she did. For instance, is “upend” a stronger choice than “beat”? Ask your kids what words they might have picked instead.

Later you could play a version of the game with nouns, adjectives, or adverbs.

Have fun!

Image by Josh / Creative Commons Licensed

Posted in Grammar | Comments Off on Do your kids love sports?

Grammar Game (for elementary aged kids)

Do you wish your kids knew their parts of speech? Try this.

Over the next few weeks, choose a different part of speech each week. Begin, for instance, with nouns. Talk over breakfast about what a noun is:

person, place, thing or idea

Then discuss examples: bowl (for cereal), chair, nuthatch, Mike (across the table), sister, love… and so on.

Later that day, or the next day, distribute magazines and have the kids cut out noun words and noun pictures. Put in a ziplock bag.

At the end of the week, using a posterboard or tag board, create a collage using both pictures and words. These can be put together in odd ways (the word “love” stuck on a “duck” picture). Or they can be arranged into noun poems. Or they can be random with no rhyme or reason.

Label the poster “Nouns” and you’re done!

This can be done with verbs too (pictures of actions).

For adjectives, the poster can be smaller and simply be a collage of words. I like to have kids use adjectives that describe self – then a photo of the child can be added to the collage of words.

For prepositions, have fun. Cut out the words: in, out, under, over, below, beside, above, around, through and so on. Then create pictures that show these by cutting out, for instance, a dog and a house. Put the dog “above” the house with the word “above.” Put an airplane “below” a tree with the word “below.” And so on.

Be surreal (it’s much more fun).

Julie

Posted in General, Grammar, Young Writers | 3 Comments »

Grammar Notes

What about grammar?

Lots of you have asked me, “What about grammar?”

Great question. I may be the wrong person to answer it!

You see, I did not major in English. I got my degree in history, and earned my Master’s in theology. I’ve studied five other languages and have learned to speak well in two of them. But as far as sentence diagramming? Well, I hardly remember that unit in my honor’s English class… like all good public schooled kids. (Why crowd your brain with sentence diagrams when there were BOYS to flirt with?)

But this scant knowledge of grammar (as in, knowing the names for all the parts of speech, understanding sentence constructions, etc.) did not stop me from being a ghostwriter or an editor. In fact, I was the senior editor over a period of three years for one publication and the managing editor for two book projects that involved major revisions of the submitted content since the contributors were not writers.

How could businesses trust me with these publications if I didn’t have “training” in grammar, punctuation and proper syntax?

Answer:
I am a competent native speaker who reads and writes a lot.

Most of us already have a strong grasp of English grammar. Native speakers of any language know if a sentence is correctly formed by how it sounds. That is the first level of grammar awareness: being able to form sentences that sound right to other native speakers. Any native speaker over the age of five does this effortlessly.

By and large, if a person reads and writes, speaks and listens, a native speaker will learn 95% of the grammar patterns that they need to function successfully as both a writer and speaker.

So what about that five percent? Should we work on grammar and punctuation every single year of school, cycling through the same terms and constructions, beating those terms into hormonally resistant brains, when native speakers don’t really grasp the meaning of “adverbial clauses,” but use them successfully whenever they chat for sixteen hours on the phone, never taking a single breath, feet flopped over the sides of the “good chairs” in the living room, reminding me when I get a call that they are “…on the other line. Can you make it short, please?”

I say “Stop the madness!” (And give me the phone…)

I have a few tips for how to handle that five percent of grammar we misuse:

  • Read
    Read widely. Read fiction and non-fiction. Read newspaper articles, online reviews of movies and music, blogs, magazines, Shakespeare’s sonnets, poetry, field guides, flyers from the supermarket, classics and contemporary authors. Read it all.

    The special skill of line editing is working with words. A mastery of good syntax–how words are strung together well–can come in only two ways: by spending the first twenty-five years of one’s life in a drawing room with E. B. White, Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Bowen, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, John Fowles, Langston Hughes, Joyce Carol Oates, James Baldwin and John Updike or by reading their works and those of other writers whose choice of words and word arrangement establishes our standards of literate communication. (The Elements of Editing, Plotnik)

  • Copy
    Copy good writing. Copy favorite passages. Copy poems.
  • Watch TV
    I’m serious. Actors express their native language in the most sophisticated and nuanced use you will hear. Television writers design scripts to cause viewers to laugh, feel suspense, and to engage with the story. The actors take the written words and bring them to life correctly. It is rare that you hear a glaring misuse of English in a sit-com. If you do, it is because it is a part of the character’s personality. Movies and books on tape also fill a similar function. Listen to radio countdowns and talk radio shows. Go to live performances (plays). Get around masterful native speakers any time you can.
  • Dictation
    For written skills, I still think dictation is the way to grow. Kids are learning usage in context and are gently challenging themselves at a higher and higher level as they age and select harder material.
  • Foreign language instruction
    Learning another language does more to teach the content of grammar (what it is, why it works, how it works) than studying English grammar. Can you think why? It’s because you can’t rely on your ear to guide you. You are required to learn the rules in order to speak in coherent sentences. Suddenly prepositional phrases matter. Knowing whether the adjective comes before the noun or after is really important, and relevant. As a result, foreign language study is a fabulous way to learn grammar with your kids.
  • Use grammar references for the rest
    Seriously. We all do. Editors have more grammar references than anyone. Whenever I am confused or uncertain, I pop open Nitty Gritty Grammar or Woe is I and double check. Grammar check on the computer is marvelous for at least making you rethink your choice. Sometimes grammar check is wrong… and you know how you know? It sounds wrong to you. That’s how it works.

Bottom line: grammar matters, but not in the way you might remember from school. A sturdy knowledge of grammar gives kids the ability to play with language (turning nouns into verbs or adjectives into nouns). Manipulation of grammar offers writers the chance to subvert reader expectations, which in turn creates delight or surprise! Grammatical accuracy is important but not nearly as elusive to native speakers as some writing programs suggest. Rather, you want grammar instruction to offer your children the higher order skills: grammar as glamour—a gateway to power in writing.

Image © Igor Mojzes | Dreamstime.com

Posted in Grammar, Homeschool Advice | 1 Comment »

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