Liz’s World

Lauren posted this:

hi here is my sentence

I am a good cook. I can cook lots of things like lasagna which can be hard to get right and I can make my own pesto sauce or also some desserts too. I learn how to cook from when I was a child. My mother had five children so she cooked a lot and thats where I learned it from. Lots of people tell me I am good at cooking now and that makes me happy. My mom would be proud.

That’s a great paragraph, Lauren. You brought up different kinds of things that you could cook, and talked about your mom, which could end up being two main ideas in an essay. You might think about a third thing if you ever wanted to turn this into an full essay, but it’s a great start!

I noticed you had a few run-on sentences, so I thought I might talk about that a little.

Run-ons are pretty hard to catch. When we talk, we say a lot of “ands” and “buts” without really pausing sometimes. Our brains don’t think like an essay, they just kinda run and run. Just like run-ons.

“I can cook lots of things like lasagna which can be hard to get right and I can make my own pesto sauce or also some desserts too.”

This sentence can be split up. They best thing to do to split it is to find the verbs and the conjunctions (joining words). I’ll mark the verbs in green and the conjunctions in red.

“I can cook lots of things like lasagna which can be hard to get right and I can make my own pesto sauce or also some desserts too.”

A good rule to follow is to have two verbs at the most in each sentence. Since there’s three verbs in this sentence, it can be cut down to two sentences by removing the and. I would also replace the “or” with “and” because “or” means that you can cook pesto sauce or desserts, not both.

“I can cook lots of things like lasagna which can be hard to get right. I can make my own pesto sauce and also some desserts too.” Read the rest of this entry »

Vic wrote:

Well Good advice. But still unable to get Idea or moving to start to write essay I am worried to take my test on January 15th . and I need to start or just giving up. I did try reading every day for one month and copying others. Or, what was the other word for copying statements making it your own?
Still having hard time to come up with an idea to write!

Okay, Vic, here’s some more advice! Hopefully we can get you going: Read the rest of this entry »

Hi again! Here’s a good link I found… it’s another journal writing help. It’s just a list of questions, and you can write an answer to one each day.

http://www.canteach.ca/elementary/prompts.html

The important thing is to use the question to really write something… Think about what it’s asking, and try to write a whole paragraph to give an answer, not just one or two words. It’s writing practice, so you’ve got to write!

The first one is this: What is something you dislike about yourself?

Here’s what I tried to write:

One thing I don’t like about myself is that I’m always unsure. I guess I’m not very optimistic. I feel like the choices I make will usually be wrong, and sometimes it’s better not to make any choice at all! But that doesn’t turn out too well, either. I think that if I just think through a problem and trust myself to make a good decision, then things will turn out better. I need to practice clear thinking so that I can make good decisions and be more sure of myself!

Try writing a paragraph yourself, and let me know in the comments what you wrote!

Here’s a cool link I found:

http://www.cmmayo.com/d5mwe.html

There’s a 5-minute writing exercise for every day of the year. For each day, there’s a little blurb like to start a story. So, you take the blurb and use it to write for 5 minutes straight without stopping. It’s really for writing stories, but I think it would help anyone improve their writing. I found the one for today, and here it is:

October 22 “Falling Mirror”

Today’s exercise is courtesy of Christine Boyka Kluge, a poet and visual artist who lives in North Salem, New York.

Imagine a mirror falling. Into a canyon, into a river, onto a tile floor. Is it an antique hand mirror framed with silver roses, a faceted disco ball, or a fitting room triptych, flapping through space? Was it accidentally thrown? Is the owner of the mirror beautiful and vain, or grotesque and horrified? Perhaps the owner isn’t even human. Is it a flawed angel, an escaped gorilla, a mystified alien? View the world in reflected fragments, be the eye of the mirror as it falls. What scenes are captured as it plummets /drifts / explodes? How do these images impact / “reflect” the mirror’s owner?

Here’s what I wrote:

I am a mirror, falling to the ground. I am falling from a great height, and I turn and turn and turn as I fall. I’m falling from the top of a tree. I can see the sky reflect on my surface as I face upwards, and then the dark ground, getting closer, as I face downward. And then upward, where I came from. In the tree, a person. Now down again, facing the ground, where the dry leaves cover the pine needles and the dirt. Now up again. It’s a skydiver, because I can see the brightly colored parachute tangled in the tree. Now the tree branches crash into me as I fall. I am cracking. Leaves, birds, bark, brush, all is reflected in me. I catch the light. Yes, that’s what I’m for, to catch the light, to signal someone, so that the skydiver can be rescued. I cannot control my fall, I can only hope that I’ll land face-upward, that I’ll reflect the bit of sunlight that will bring help soon enough.

Wow, that was kind of a cool experience. Try it! Let me know what you write… and let me know what you think of my writing, too.