This one is obviously for Mom, who loved to read us Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst when we were little. Or maybe we just asked for it a lot. This is the gem that starts the book, and I ask you, how could anyone write a sentence... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
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. One of the... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
