Anthology Revisions!

As we are in the library today, we will work on revisions on our anthology writing. I am so excited to see this book coming together, and the harder we work now on revisions, the better our final book will be. Remember that ALL GOOD WRITING IS REWRITING. Remember that Ernest Hemingway (who won the Nobel Prize for Literature!) rewrote the ends of one of his novels 34 times!

Remember that every single writer who ever has a book, or a poem, or a story published has revised that book, or story, or poem many, MANY, MANY times!

So, let's revise! Follow the list of steps below to work through revisions today...

1. Open up your anthology writing in your Google Docs.

2. Read through your piece, and change any errors that jump out at you right away on this first read-through. If you see a need for a comma, that IT'S COMMA TIME! If you see a Comma-Splice Run-On sentence (remember CSRO?) than change that comma to a semi-colon! Or break it into two sentences! Yes! Huzzah! Or, if you hear parts of your piece that sound awkward, rewrite them for clarity.

3. Now, open up our List of Writing Rules and have a quick read-through of our rules once again. (We used these with our synthesis essays.)

4. Go through your anthology writing again with this list of rules open in another window. Check your piece for each of these rules, and make revisions with these Rules in mind.

5. Now, once you've done these two rounds of edits, find a partner who is also finished, and share your Google Doc with them (write their e-mail address in the "Share" space, and they will now be able to open up your Google Doc, and you will be able to open up theirs).

6. Go through your partner's anthology writing with our Writing Rules in mind.

And...YES! You now have three rounds of revisions on your writing. Remarkable. Amazing. Perspicaciously awesome.

Let me know if you've finished all of these steps, and then it's time for a conference with Mr. R.

Excited!

Unraveling Mystery; Honoring the Semi-Colon

While you all know my favorite word is perspicacious, you now know that my favorite punctuation is the semi-colon! It is beautiful; it is precious. And, in our writing, we often try to use a comma where the spot rightfully belongs the honorable semi-colon!

Today, we explored what a CSRO is. And we learned that CSRO does not stand for Cosmically Studious Runaway Otters. We also learned that CSRO does not stand for Conscientious and Slimy Robot Orangutans.

No!

CSRO stands for COMMA SPLICE RUN-ON. It means, essentially, that we have tried to take two sentences which should stand alone and we've forced them to go together in a single sentence. But we can't do it. No way! We're trying to splice those complete sentences together with a comma and those sentences are yelling, "Please! No! Don't splice me together with that other sentence!"

Instead, we need to use the magical, honorable...SEMI-COLON. The semi-colon takes the place of a period here, so that both sentences can now be put together in a single sentence. Here's the picture of our board from today so that you can be reminded of our class notes and how we explored this grammatical necessity:

Also, we read Roald Dahl's masterful (and very creepy) short story, "Lamb to the Slaughter." We talked about inferences and how sometimes authors leave key details out so that we have to dig (and have fun digging) to figure out what has happened, and why.

Our word for the day was divulge, which means to reveal or make public.

The homework for Monday is to bring in your first draft (at least three pages) of your creative short story. (Here is the assignment again in case you need it.) 

Have a marvelous weekend!