Monday, 2/1/2010

CREATIVE WRITING

Homework Due

• Journal #2

Writing Lesson

• Diction!
• We tried our hand at animal groupings by trying to match things up on A Bunch of ... on page 23.  We worked on our own, then with a group, and then checked our answers with the key as a class.  The point is that some vocabulary is specific to certain groups of people, and it's therefore unfamiliar to us.
• We took a look at the Catchphrases on pages 24-5.  We got into trios, and we created a scene to show the rest of the class how our catchphrase would be used in context.  We talked about the notion that slang terms can and do fade over time, that some words popularity is brief and fleeting.
• Lastly, we read the article about the last native speaker of the Catawba language dying (p. 26), and we talked about the notion of an entire language dying out.  I told everyone to pretend he or she could preserve only twenty words from the English language--which words would be saved, and why?  We read and discussed five models on page 26.  

Writing Assignment

• Death of Language (p. 26)
• We had twenty-five minutes to work on the assignment, and most people flipped through the dictionary and/or started typing a word list.

Homework

• None

ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING

Homework Due

• Photo Poem

Writing Experiment #4

• Dramatize Your Morning Routine--we read the assignment for Hurtling Towards Cereal, Spoon at Ready (p. 2).  The main challenge is to take something average, ordinary, and possibly boring (your morning routine), and dramatize it using sophisticate vocabulary.  I read Adam's model, and I read my own, and then we took twenty minutes to type, save and print our own stories.

Sharing

• We read the Bad Poems aloud, and we talked about what made them bad.  Some of our ideas were as follows:

Where is all the badness coming from?

• non-sensical title
• random indents
• no imagery
• weak line breaks
• doesn’t cohere as a whole
• random rhyming
• erratic puncuation
• cliché phrasings
• random slang/catchphrases
• erratic structure
• corniness
• “The End” at the end of the poem.  "We don’t do that."  –Morgan
• no spacing when spacing is needed
• no title
• bad onomatopoeia—too much of a good thing ("pewpew")
• misspellings
• overdone rhyming
• intentionally confusing contradictions—young old boy

Peer Conferencing

• We traded Photo Poems, and we made comments and suggestions for each other.  Everyone traded twice.

Memories

• Everyone got a take-out box.  We put each of our three favorite memories on a slip of  paper, then put it inside the box. 

Homework

• None