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A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Thoughts from my home to yours

Podcast: Englishes

Brave Writer Podcast: Englishes

What is the relationship between speech and writing?

For those of you who are long-term Brave Writer fans, you’ll know that I refer to Dr. Peter Elbow as “my mentor.” His vision for writing has long guided how I teach.


[This post contains Amazon affiliate links. When you click on those links to make purchases, Brave Writer receives compensation at no extra cost to you. Thank you!]


When Peter Elbow’s new book Vernacular Eloquence hit the stores, it was thrilling to realize that Brave Writer has already captured and honed these very insights, but in the most practical way. We urge the kind of linguistic development Dr. Elbow examines in his research in this volume.

He and I have since dialogued about the way Brave Writer has evolved and explored that relationship through the most unique, yet effective context for writing growth: the parent-child editor-writer relationship.

Englishes podcast by Julie Bogart

The podcast today is about how to foster the various voices/registers needed for the variety of writing tasks our kids will face. How do we help them move between what Elbow calls “Edited Written English” (EWE) and the spoken language they use orally and in writing (online, in casual correspondence, when writing for popular audiences)?

Elbow says that EWE is “Shorthand: [for] ‘no mistakes.” This need to avoid mistakes is the key source of paralysis in the writing endeavor as many of you well know. Our aim to free the original writing impulse to come forth without undue pressure is what makes Brave Writer’s approach to writing different than other writing strategies.

Elbow goes on:

Students are constantly warned not to confuse their everyday speech with ‘serious’ writing. EWE or standardized written English is a dialect or language that differs in grammar and register from everyday speech.

He continues:

When students and others follow traditional advice and try for correctness at every moment, their language is often stiff, awkward, and unclear. Their attempts sometimes even lead them to the kind of peculiar mistakes people make when they try to use a language they don’t know well. Because of this, many people try to play it safe and stick to relatively simple sentences. When teachers look at student texts with this kind of simplified or plodding language, they sometimes blame speech—when really is was fear of speech that impoverished the syntax. When people let themselves genuinely speak onto the page, their language is more flexible and complex and sometimes eloquent.

Join Noah and me for a discussion of how these various “Englishes” manifest in the homeschool and what you can do to help support fluency in all of them.

Julie


Would you please post a review on Apple Podcasts for us?
Help a homeschooler like you find more joy in the journey. Thanks!

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Podcasts | 3 Comments »


Friday Freewrite: Animals

two Ferrets kits (10 weeks)
 
If your dog could talk or your cat could cook or your pet gerbil could calculate, what would they say/do? Use personification (giving human traits to animals or inanimate objects) to make your pet more human-like.

Posted in Friday Freewrite | 2 Comments »


Retelling: Details or Summary or Both?

Helping Your Child Narrate

Great phone call today. Here’s the gist:

Mom: What do I do when my son [age 11] retells the details of a book or movie or story, but he can’t tell me the overarching narrative that goes with it? Like he can’t say the main plot points. He rambles and gets caught up in details that are non-essential to the plot, but he tells them with so much accuracy and depth, I hate to stop him.

My response:

Adults summarize. They can pick out the main points and sequence them. They’ve read 1000s of stories, watched as many films, and are well aware of the narrative arc (plot diagram) by virtue of time on the planet and years logged reading/absorbing “story.”

Kids don’t have this background, and can’t summarize like you. They’re younger. Story is fresh for them. They are beguiled by subplots and character quirks and twists. They chase the shiny object called “weapons,” “cute puppies,” “sassy friends,” “weird creatures,” “magic spells” or “epic battles” and report all that is filling their imaginations to the brink of enthusiasm. When you ask them to tell you about the story, the most exciting, fascinating points overflow. They can’t “sort” the images and emotions. They aren’t likely to sequence events into the narrative arc. They retell the memorable moments, with detail, reliving them in front of you.

Of course, most adults have completely lost the ability to trap details to that extent. Our brains are too busy for detail. We save the important markers and ditch the quirky dialog or style of weaponry. Children can retell with amazing accuracy. We have too many digits, words, experiences, memories, obligations in the way of uncluttered retelling. We hang onto the big picture and file it under “mental notecard” – as in, if asked, this is what I share.

Retelling: details or summary or both?

Being able to summarize is a fairly sophisticated skill. It is possible to cultivate, but please don’t think it a superior skill to retelling in detail. For now, here’s how I want you to proceed:

Start by listening, really closely. Ask real questions that help you understand who, what, where, and when as the child relates the particular scene. You can jot down the responses on separate sheets of paper per scene or image or dialog. Keep these on a table in front of you. Ask for key details (names, places, why such-and-such happened).

Print a plot diagram (a simple one).

Then, with these notes in front of you both, ask some of these questions to help sort the information just shared:

1. Pick up one of the stories: Did this event happen at the beginning, or in the middle, or near the end of the story/film/book? Move the note you took to the right place on the table along the narrative arc. Do that for each of the scenes you’ve jotted down.

2. Ask the child what moment decided the outcome (the climax)? It may be difficult to identify the single one (there are lots of sub-plots in most stories). But the BIG one happens near the end. So direct your child’s attention to the end of the plot line. You can even discuss ones that were important along the way, but weren’t the final key determining factor. That’s a good conversation to have!

3. Talk about the characters. Which character is the most important to the story (without whom, there would be no story)? It’s usually obvious, but not always! The main character is called “the protagonist” and that is the one who is a part of the climax. We figure out who is important by how much we care about what happens to that character. A guide to identifying that character, then, is “Whose story do we care the most about?” Of course, your child may love a character in the subplot, but then you can expand backwards and say, “Who do you think the author wants us to care most about?” That will help differentiate.

4. Now talk about the antagonist (the character that wants to thwart the goal of the main character). Who stands to gain by interrupting the progress of the protagonist?

5. Lastly, ask about the events your child narrated to you. Are these related to the protagonist’s plight? Or are they about side-kick characters? If they are “side-kick characters,” we call these scenes part of the “sub-plot.” A sub-plot keeps the story interesting, adds detail to the main plot, and supplies a distraction or complication when the author needs one. Figure out whether the memorable scenes are plot or subplot.

Retelling: details or summary or both?

Once you’ve collected this data, see if you can put it in a meaningful whole. You might narrate back to your child all the information you’ve collected and demonstrate what it means to put it in sequence. Once you’ve done that, you can ask your child to correct you, add to it, or try his/her own hand at it! Overtime, you can ask the child to take over and create the narration from this material from scratch.

What I hope you’ll take from this post:

Work with what your kids give you! Help them sort it out. Model what it looks like when it matches what you are hoping to hear. Then give them the chance to do it, with your help.

Do not abandon your child to your expectations and then wring your hands when they fail. Teach! That’s your job and your privilege.


Brave Writer Arrow Book ClubOur  Arrow Book Club provides an online discussion space for students (ages 10-12) to discuss literature using literary analysis vocabulary without the pressure of writing “essays.” Homeschool students especially need the chance to talk about what they read—-yet the busy mother-of-many doesn’t always have time to take the discussion to a written form.


Images: Children reading by Brave Writer mom, Kort / Girl reading on bed by Personal Creations (cc)

Posted in Email, Literary elements, Reading, Young Writers | 4 Comments »


Friday Freewrite: Snowfall

 

Snow day

 

Start your freewrite with this prompt: It was the first snowfall of the year…

Posted in Friday Freewrite | Comments Off on Friday Freewrite: Snowfall


Vertigo

Vertigo

A 21 year old me stood in the shower, carefully drawing the razor up the back of my leg, across the soft skin behind the knee, the way you do when you’re a girl who’s knicked herself within an inch of bleeding out at age 15. My head twirled and a loud pi-n-n-n-n-g-g-g-g-g filled my ears. The razor slid from my fingers, echoing a click-clack-click as it cascaded to the tub floor, and the world went black.

My awareness dawned slowly from some grey muffled foggy pit. I was slumped over the edge of the bathtub, ribs throbbing, crying for no reason at all and all the reasons in the world. I looked around. Is this my bathroom? Do I live here?

And then I remembered—shaving cream slid down my leg, water dripped from my hair, tears leaked from my eyes.

I had fainted. It was the first time but not the last. I would faint every few years—in bathrooms, at a friend’s house, once while trying to buy a newly killed chicken at a crowded stall in Morocco while 7 months pregnant! I have a scar on my nose from smashing into the diaper pail.

The distinctive feature of each faint, though—one I came to know and respect—vertigo. My doctor gave the syndrome a fancy Latin moniker, but translated meant: We don’t know why you have this unnamed sort of vertigo but clearly you do.

He ripped off a scribbled prescription from his white pad: “Get sleep. Stay hydrated. Pay attention to signs, sit down, and protect yourself with a pillow.”

Thanks Doc.

But it’s what I do. There’s no cure. It’s enough, weirdly.

I tried to “cure myself” many times. I read books, studied vertigo syndromes. I’ve been known to crawl on all fours across a living room floor to avoid having to stop supervising small children because standing would have “brought it on.”

My then-husband gave me a dose of niacin once (his dad took it to help with fainting). Being that neither of us are medically trained, the dose was too high and my skin became an inferno trap for my soul. My fleshy surface glowed red like Mars, and my ears wheezed smoke like a minion of Satan. I can still remember the scary trapped feeling… but I didn’t pass out! Still, not worth it.

I don’t know when it happened, but I realized eventually that I had a condition; I could befriend and live with it (or at least, not slam the door in its face when it turned up unannounced) or I could go on fighting it and agonizing over why or how or what it meant.

The thing about vertigo is that it screws with your basic assumptions about life on planet earth. Gravity is no longer the reliable old friend, gluing your feet to the floor. Instead, your body, untethered, floats or zig-zags, your head lurches sideways, and your limbs grab hold of whatever outstretched object pretends assistance. Coaching doesn’t fix it: “Hold my hand Julie! Lean on me. Don’t give in!”

The only help is awareness of the warning signs, and preparing for the crash landing. Which I do now: As the pi-n-n-n-n-g-g-g-g-g begins its whisper and drives to crescendo, as my eyes drain the color from the room, as my head wheels its merry-go-round spin, I grab the nearest pillow and get on the ground. I lean my forehead into the cushion, breathing, eyes-closed, until all symptoms pass. And they do pass. And I don’t faint. My nose has no new scars in the last 20+ years.

It’s tempting to force an analogy about homeschool burn out, or the exhaustion of mothering, or the uneasiness in your marriage, or the frightening spectre of your own unexplained illness. I esteem you more highly. I recently looked at a photo of my family taken in 2005 on our family trip to Italy. I couldn’t know then what I know now——how my life would flip upside-down, how what I knew to be sure and true could change lickety-split, how my basic assumptions about what made sense or what was right would be turned on their heads. I didn’t yet know how to protect myself from crash-landings.

But I’ve learned. Each of us does, in our own way, in our own time.

You know what helps me the most after I faint and I’m crying like I’m a channel for all the suffering of the whole world? Kindness and cookies and a hug and reminders that the people I love, love me. Lectures about fainting—not so much.

Wishing you safe passage through whatever vertigo you’re facing.


The Homeschool Alliance

Posted in Julie's Life | 7 Comments »


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