I attended the Short Narrative Essay weekend workshop in June.  It was an enjoyable and useful workshop, in large measure because of the student group.  One of my classmates in particular, Michael Jackman, was as good or better than any instructor I’ve had in my 5 Iowa workshop experiences.  He offered helpful, incisive feedback to participants in a warm, encouraging, non-threatening manner.  A nice touch of humor as well.  It was my sense that there was general consensus in the group about this.

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www.page2stage.com

I was actually looking to see if an update was available to the program I was using, Scriptware, which has become obsolete and seems to be dead, though the Web site is live. Wikepedia gets credit for this one. Thanks Wiki!

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Try a workshop for 10% off. Enter coupon code “FIRSTWWP” when checking out.

Workshop Details:

WWP workshop 9/7/2010

Next Meeting:
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
6:00 – 9:30 (ish) p.m.

Heine Brothers’ Chenoweth Lane (“Green Room”)
119 Chenoweth Lane, Louisville, KYTel: 502-893-5103
Topic: TBA
Limit: 3-10 participants per meeting

WWP Advantages:

• Receive special presentations on writing craft
• Meet and network with other writers
• Participate in a professional fiction, poetry & essay writers workshop
• All writing levels welcome!
• Low $35 workshop fee covers room rental, handouts, snacks.
• Contact me for more info.

CANCELLATION POLICY: If you must cancel, please give 24 hours’ notice to receive a refund (minus a $10 reservation fee). (If I have to cancel for any reason, your total fee is always refunded.)

Comments from participants:

Listening to a short presentation, participating in a writing excercise, and watching Michael apply the technique to his own writing was fascinating. He demonstrated effectively how changing point of view can improve a writer’s work. I also received important feedback on the project I am working on. – Kimberly Anderson

Class last night was great. The participants seem like amazing, giving people and are all high-caliber writers. — Susan McDaniel

Try out a WWP meeting for 10% off! Use coupon "FIRSTWWP" when checking out.

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More about the WWP:

• Everything you need to know about why I created the WWP
• What to bring to the workshop and how to prepare your drafts
• View a printable flyer

Map & Directions: Heine Bros. on Chenoweth Lane is near where Frankfort Ave. meets Shelbyville Rd.

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(This is a preview of the full article available online for purchase)

by Michael Jackman, Director, Writers Workshop Project

To help make Word 2007 more helpful to creative writers, here are three solutions to a common problem with default styles.

Problem: “Normal” Style

The new “Normal” style is causing problems for teachers, editors and writers. Why did Microsoft decide on making this style, with extra line spaces before and after paragraphs and the non-standard Calibri font face, the default? We may never know, but the most important question for writers is, how do we change it to something writer-friendly? There are a few options.

Use the “No Spacing” style and change fonts.

Here’s a screen shot of Word’s Home ribbon, showing the Styles Gallery. Notice that Normal is highlighted by default. Look four boxes over and you’ll see a style called No Spacing. If you don’t have a wide-enough monitor, you’ll have to scroll across the Styles list to see it.

Before creating a draft, you can do the following: click No Spacing, change the font to Times New Roman, and turn on double spacing, either by Home | Paragraph, click the Line Spacing icon, and selecting 2.0, or using thekeyboard shortcut Ctl-2.

It’s one solution, but with too many steps. Let’s make a more useful change:

Reset Word’s default styles and add a style for drafts.

I hope you enjoyed the preview. Purchase the full article for more info:

changing word 2007 quick styles

Word 2007 is not as friendly by default as it should be to writers. This quick guide will have you making Word’s styles conform to your needs in no time.

• Format: PDF
• Pages: 4

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The Problem: Word automatically capitalizes the first word of every sentence and every new line. You do not write poetry in that format, and are tired of backspacing and changing all those words. Or worse, you’re letting Word tell you how to format your poetry.

The Solution: A few simple checkboxes.

(The steps are for Word 2007; menu choices will be different for other versions)

1. Click the Office icon at the top left of Word, then choose Word Options from the bottom of the menu.
2. Click Proofing
3. From the screen on the right, click the box “AutoCorrect Options” in the first section, called “AutoCorrect Options”
4. Uncheck “Capitalize first letter of sentences”

Word will now no longer automatically replace what it considers “incorrect” lower case letters.

But it will still mark this error with the green, squiggly “Grammar Error” underline. To turn off that annoyance:

1. In the section called “When Correcting Grammar and Spelling in Word” click the “Settings” button.
2. Uncheck “Capitalization”
3. Click OK

Now Word will stop reminding you that you don’t know what you’re doing.

If you’re likely to make other grammatical, spelling and syntactical “errors” in your poems, click one more box in this screen, “Hide grammar errors in this document only”

More Options: Set Word to ignore capitalization in either all new documents or just the current one. The very bottom of the screen has a drop-down box called “Exceptions For.” Choose either the current document name, or “All New Documents.”

If you find this tip helpful, let me know by using my Contact page (or leaving a comment below).

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ok, so like 4 a disclaimer i should say right up front that i both use and admire formal english & i want my students 2 like use it & admire it 2

& like im so anal when texting that i uh revise my texts & almost never use shorthand

anyway the point im trying 2 make is that there r no apostrophes in spoken english

or capital letters

or the various punctuation marks

or spaces either between words or phonemes

texting is a more phonetic & therefore verbal writing then formal writing

i think thats pretty interesting & also i like how it reveals the difference between speaking & formal writing

also it shows that when students apostrophes r left off its not about grammar its about usage which means its not so much wrong as irreverent & disrespectful, kind of like a kiss my ass told 2 the institution of written language

we cn all lighten up about language some x

thats all neat 2 realize & i hope u r thinking its neat 2

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So look for more entries on teaching writing, and also look for some teacherly products, coming in the future, such as lesson plans for creative writing.

All this I hope will benefit everyone, including folks who want to make their own informal writing workshops more focused and craft-oriented.

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Often it’s a table. On the left is list of things you want to assess. Across the top a score from 1-3 or 0-5, say. In the type I use, an analytic rubric, I also articulate what distinguishes one level from another. So it might look like this:

Rubric for grading research papers:

etcetera….

Each category is graded, totaled and averaged. The rubric above has two categories and a top paper would earn 8/8 points.

For a rubric to work, to be “better than nothing,” it has to be a good one. Duh. Still, in writing, a good rubric goes against the grain for what teachers have often been taught about assessment: that they have to be able to “quantify” everything or it’s not assessment. Which is funny, because a writing rubric is a subjective tool, and all the scoring numbers are themselves subjective.

A rubric doesn’t assess everything possible. It limits itself to what you think students ought to know and be able to do after teaching them something. And for the sake of time, you get to decide what, of all these things, are the most important to rate.

I can go on and on about rubrics, but the main point is that when it comes to assessing writing, the measures have to be more subjective than a quantifying profession likes. The small but vocal number of future elementary teachers who argue with me about this after taking their methods courses makes me suspicious that a larger but not vocal number of future elementary teachers is not arguing with me. That is, those whose philosophy is, “never argue with the teacher; we’ll do what we want later.”

What I want to caution you about, if by chance you do this, is to create a writing rubric like this:

Rubric for grading student short stories or memoirs or other narratives:

etcetera….

I hope you’re chuckling now. But if you’re not, here’s the problem. Well, let me ask you this:

• Is it possible to have an outstanding story that only has one line of really good dialogue?
• Is it possible to have crappy description that uses seven or more strong descriptive words?
• Is it possible to have a crappy dialogue that has more than five lines of dialogue?

You get it. when it comes to writing, creative writing or anything else, counting is not assessing. There’s no rationale for calling dialogue outstanding based on the number of lines, or description effective based on the number of words.

So remember, when you teach narrative writing, and when you make your rubrics, don’t base them on how much. Instead, teach your students how to format dialogue, but also teach that dialogue creates character and shows what that character is feeling. It even employs subtext – characters say one thing but mean something else. Don’t underestimate your students. Fourth graders can understand subtext very well. Then create a rubric that really assesses how well students’ craft works.

You’ll really be teaching some good writing skills then!

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The easiest way to prove this is find newspaper articles, novels, academic papers, and any other genres of writing, and tally up the paragraphs. You’ll see paragraph lengths anywhere from one word to 20 sentences or more. Have your students do this.

True grammar scholars, such as A.H. Markwardt (Introduction to the English Language) define a paragraph simply as a unit of cohesion – a block of text that the author decides needs to be together, and separated from other blocks of text. They go on to explain that what belongs to this “coherent” unit called a “paragraph” depends upon how the writer decides to organize the material. It’s partly a “feeling.” Unfortunately for a profession that likes quantification, no rule can be invented for how long one should be. Is a paragraph more correct or a thought more complete just because it used five sentences instead of three?

“My thought ran seven sentences. Uh oh, my thoughts are too long.” Doesn’t that seem absurd?

Recently I was teaching an elementary ed required class called, “Writing for Teachers.” I had the students research this subject and finally had them agree with me. Only problem: they were scared to put their new knowledge into practice. Why? Because of their own elementary ed teachers. One brave student used the new knowledge for another class. She told me a week later she had points removed from her response because her paragraphs “were too long.”

From now on you don’t have to teach that or take that from teachers. And if someone marks you down, you can just point…

…to this Web site.

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