Wednesday, August 25, 2010

to hide his admiration of felicia william waggish makes a tasteless but funny joke about girls. noone listened and everyone turned their head in alessandras direction to here her story. they too were used too williams lame poems vapid jokes and friendly barbs

lame—weak, ineffective vapid—flat, dull

barbs—critical remark or comment

Paint a picture with words.

1. How do we bring sentences to life by adding detail and description?

2. How do commas control the traffic of a sentence?

3. How do writers structure sentences to pack them with detail?

What is the difference between these two women?

Georgia O’Keefe

J.K. Rowling

What is the difference between these two men?

Van GoghErnest

Hemingway

Define: Artist

Compare the two passages:

“It was winter. Everything was frozen and white with snow. Snow had fallen from the sky for days. The weather was horrible.”

“Mossflower lay deep in the grip of midwinter beneath a sky of leaden gray that showed tinges of scarlet and orange on the horizon. A cold mantle of snow draped the landscape, covering the flatlands to the west. Snow was everywhere, filling the ditches, drifting high against the hedgerows, making paths invisible, smoothing the contours of earth in its embrace.”

The high school student writes like a house painter, ignoring detailsignoring details and using color to

simply cover the surface.

Paint! That’s the magic word.

Paint pictures with words. That’s the greatest advice I can give anybody.

Paint the pictures with words. The pictures will appear in the

imagination, so the person reading it can say…

“I SEE THAT!” `Brian Jacques

Writing is seeing!“Language shapes our perceptions and our

perceptions shape our reality.

“The way you select words and organize them into whole compositions depends on the way you see human experience. If you literally do not see anything, you will of course have nothing to say.” (Leavitt & Sohn)

What does it mean to “See”?????

Brushstrokes

• Participles

• Appositives

• Adjectives Shifted out of Order

• Absolutes

Paint a picture with words.

So Let’s Begin to PPAAIINNTT…

With ParticiplesParticiples!

• Hissing, slithering, and coiling, the diamond-scaled snakes attacked their prey.

• Flying through the air on the wings of a dream, the Olympic long jumper thrust the weight of his whole body forward.

• Melody froze, dripping with sweat, hoping with all her might that

they wouldn’t hear the noise. A beam of light swung out into the darkness, searching.

• The clown, appearing bright and cheerful, smiled and did his act with unusual certainty for someone who had just killed a man.

• The rhino, caught in the tangled rope, looked for freedom.

• Shifting the weight of the line to his left shoulder and kneeling carefully, he washed his hand in the ocean and held it there, submerged, for more than a minute, watching the blood trail away and the steady movement of the water against his hand as the boat moved. (pgs 56-57 Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway)

Hissing, slithering, coiling

Flying…

So what IS a

“Participle?

What kinds of

words are these?

Dripping, hoping…

Appearing…Shifting, kneeling,

watching…

Participle:A verb ending in

“-ing.”

The purpose is to add ACTION!

Let’s Try!The dog sat in the car.

__________________, the dog sat in the car.

The dog sat in the car, _________________.

The dog, ________________, sat in the car.

Now You Try on Your Own!

The couple sat in the park.

________________, the couple sat in the park.

The couple sat in the park, _______________.

The couple, _______________, sat in the park.