I love this -
I've been digging into the Writing Skills book from EPS, also. I have book 2.
It works well with The Paragraph Book. Book 2 is a bit more sophisticated than The Paragraph Book, so it feels more like a book pointed towards remedial upper-middle school, or high school.
It delves into formula, but is not so rigid about following a specific one like The Paragraph book.
The Writing Skills teacher's guide is not so much a book with the answers, but a good overall how-to for teachers and parents. I still like answers (even if there's more than one) when I get a teacher's guide, but this guide is really informative.
Writing Skills is very specific with its target concepts, (like The Paragraph Book,) but covers more ground in a more advanced way.
The Paragraph book looks deceptively simple, but it has revealed some interesting things about my son. For instance, book one is all about writing a simple paragraph about how to do something. They have to write several of these kinds of paragraphs with the formula: FNTF (which means First, Next, Then, Finally...)
My son wrote one on how to put toothpaste on a toothbrush. He wrote as sparingly as he could since he thought it was a stupid exercise. I kept telling him he needed more detail, but he argued that he didn't.
Finally, I had him read to me his paragraph while I tried to follow his directions exactly as though I was an alien. After bursting out laughing at my attempts to follow his directions, he finally got what I was saying.
He seems to have no sense of audience.
For practice writing paragraph, check out Paragraph Magazine at http://conan.ids.net/~oatcity/Paragraph.html. It is a magazine whose entries are paragraphs, one to a page, no longer than 200 words. You may submit paragraphs to the magazine and if you're published you get 3 free copies. When I fancied being a writer some years ago, I used to submit to them. I have been published in some issues from about 1992 or so. It's harder than it looks. Start with something you've written that's about 1,000 words and see if you can whittle it down to 200.
ReplyDeleteHere's a description of the mag from the website:
"Paragraph approaches the short form — tales of around 200 words — as a homeopathic remedy for media overload. Homeopathy, you’ll recall, is a medical therapy based on the “law of similars.” Cure comes through small doses of the very thing that ails you. So we’re an antidote; the world is a glut of disparate information — sound bites and photo ops and MTV — which titillate us and distract us and probably corrupt us. Paragraph magazine is filled with “short takes of ordered sensibility.” "
wow!
ReplyDeletefantastic!