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Sentence combining and text reconstruction are going to be the new regime around here.
This morning Ed looked at the baseball sentence combining exercise I created from a sentence in a Times article. He would have put the sentence together differently, which gave me the idea that I should have both Ed and Christopher do one exercise a day and then compare notes.
I've just typed up this text reconstruction exercise for Day One.
I'm psyched.
................................
Read the sentences, decide which comes first, second, third, and fourth, and number them in order.
_____ Human beings are not the natural prey of tigers, and it is only when tigers have been incapacitated through wounds or old age that, in order to live, they are compelled to take a diet of human flesh.
_____ The stress of circumstances is, in nine out of ten cases, wounds, and in the tenth case old age.
_____ The wound that has caused a particular tiger to take to man-eating might be the result of a carelessly fired shot and failure to follow up and recover the wounded animal, or the result of the tiger having lost his temper when killing a porcupine.
_____ A man-eating tiger is a tiger that has been compelled, through stress of circumstances beyond its control, to adopt a diet alien to it.
source:
Man-Eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett, p vii
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944
Check your numbers with your Dad. Where you disagree, explain to each other why you arranged the sentences as you did.
Next, copy the sentences in the order you numbered them on a separate sheet of paper. Do not copy word-by-word. For each sentence, follow these steps:
1. Read as many words as you believe you can write correctly from memory (five to ten).
2. Write those words from memory, including all capitals and punctuation marks.
3. Check back to the original sentence and correct any errors you made.
4. Read the next group of words and repeat the steps.
Sometimes you may be able to remember an entire simple sentence correctly. But with a large difficult-to-spell word, you may try to write only that one word correctly from memory.
Ben Franklin used this technique to teach himself to write.
..............................
original paragraph:
A man-eating tiger is a tiger that has been compelled, through stress of circumstances beyond its control, to adopt a diet alien to it. The stress of circumstances is, in nine out of ten cases, wounds, and in the tenth case old age. The wound that has caused a particular tiger to take to man-eating might be the result of a carelessly fired shot and failure to follow up and recover the wounded animal, or the result of the tiger having lost his temper when killing a porcupine. Human beings are not the natural prey of tigers, and it is only when tigers have been incapacitated through wounds or old age that, in order to live, they are compelled to take a diet of human flesh.
Man-Eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944
p vii
Oxford India Paperbacks
help for the struggling writer
sentence combining exercise
we're starting a copybook
man-eaters of Kumaon - text reconstruction
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2 comments:
Liz again from I Speak of Dreams. Happily, my ddd (darling dyslexic daughter) has not been workshopped, and has benefitted from some great writing instruction.
Her process--notes handwritten on stickies, put stickies on the big window & rearrange into coherence, sit in front of window with laptop and pound out the first draft.
Extended handwritten work degrades in quality, compared to composing on the keyboard. I think it's the amount of mental bandwidth handwriting + spelling takes up.
First draft is printed out and annotated by hand. Revision on the computer. Lather, rinse, repeat as many times as necessary. One of her last essays for school went through six drafts, with no complaints from her.
She also uses a peer proofreader for the penultimate draft, if she can't charm Mom into doing a look-over.
Key presupposition: she's a fast & accurate keyboarder.
If the boys are complaining about handwriting, consider their keyboarding skills.
Her process--notes handwritten on stickies, put stickies on the big window & rearrange into coherence, sit in front of window with laptop and pound out the first draft.
This sounds like Temple (Grandin's) process in college.
She used index cards on a bulletin board.
I've been thinking about getting a bulletin board for me, too.
I sometimes use a little stand-up 5x7 magnetic board on my desk, which works pretty well.
THANKS!
Another comment to "pull up front"!
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