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Sentence Diagramming: Stuff of Stars
I love picture books. Not all of them. I lean away from super silly and toward the ones with really cool language. Picture books let writers play with theme and plot without worrying too much if something makes sense to adults. They follow kid logic. They can also get away with prose that would never…
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Sentence Diagramming: Michael Perry Favorites
Michael Perry has one of my favorite writerly voices. He writes approachable but still aching beautiful prose, prose that makes an English major like me grab for a pencil to underline and annotate and star as I read. And since he narrates his own audiobooks (and I’ve seen him in person a few times), I…
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Sentence Diagramming: The Red Wheelbarrow
I don’t get most poetry. If it doesn’t rhyme, and there’s no rhythm, I don’t understand the point of the line breaks; wouldn’t poems be easier to read if they were unbroken text? I also have a hard time enjoying a piece of writing when I don’t understand what it’s trying to say, and poems…
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Portrait of a Woman as a Young Mother
Appeared in August 2019, The Cabinet of Heed In the framed photo, a woman in profile—eyes smudged with dark circles, shoulder adorned with an epaulette of spit-up—hugs a newborn tight and high on her chest, resting her cheek on his head. The baby’s eyelids look like closed pistachios. His ears match the monkey’s on his…
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Waste Not, Want Not?: a deep dive into the wonderful, wacky world of organic waste disposal
My husband paused halfway between the trashcan and kitchen sink, clutching an apple core. “Tell me again what I do with this?” “Compost.” I pointed to the green compost bin, courtesy of our new trash haulers, Earthbound Environmental Solutions. He paused. “Why is that better than the garbage disposal?” “Climate change.” He paused. He pauses…
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Sentence Diagramming: Where the Wild Things Are
In these sporadic sentence diagramming posts, I diagram sentences to deepen their meaning, to become a better writer, or for my own amusement. One of the pieces of advice I received when I wrote a book about planets for my son was to match the number of words in a sentence to the age of the…
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Sentence Diagramming: Jane Eyre Part 3
In these sporadic sentence diagramming posts, I diagram sentences to deepen their meaning, to improve my writing, or for my own amusement. The shortest sentences can have the greatest impact. Think of the famous first line from Moby Dick, “Call me Ishmael.” Scholars have written tomes on that sentence. Me, I prefer Jane Eyre.
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Sentence Diagramming: Jane Eyre Part 2
In these sporadic sentence diagramming posts, I diagram sentences to deepen their meaning, to become a better writer, or for my own amusement. Patterns are clues. They tell us what to expect next. They feel mathematical and safe and empowering. Even preschoolers know red always precedes orange, which always precedes yellow. Is there any more pleasing…
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Why is That? Why Does Birch Tree Bark Peel Off?
Originally appeared in Chippewa Valley Family Magazine. Birch bark can be so tempting to peeeel off. But wait! Is that a good idea? Why is the bark coming off, anyway? Is the birch sick? Let’s look at the layers of a tree. Bark is made of two layers, outer and inner bark. Outer bark is…
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Sentence Diagramming: Jane Eyre Part 1
In these sporadic sentence diagramming posts, I diagram sentences to deepen their meaning or for my own amusement. During the Kavanaugh hearings, a quote by Jackson Katz about why the subjects and objects we choose matter floated around the Internet. Katz writes, “We talk about how many teenage girls … got pregnant last year, rather than…
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Katie Venit 