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Yesterday morning I was reading the Brevity blog, one of my favorite sites. Jeanne Bonner explains “The Obituary We All Need (To Write)” citing the one she wrote for her father. At 250 words it utterly failed to capture her father, the person he was, the parent, the complications of their relationship, her grief at…
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Yes, I am writing this part of my Monday post early so that by the time you read it I will be someplace else and doing something other than writing. There, see how I did that? Present tense and future in a single sentence? I ran two miles, only some of it uphill, on Friday…
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I began writing this on Tuesday, three days ago, and you won’t read it until Friday morning. It was a chilling, damp morning but we walked north to the headland, zig-zagging back home. We spotted the little shore birds on our way north, found sea glass walking both directions (35 pieces by the time you…
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2. The monster sentence. Begin with a simple short sentence—“I baked bread”—subject verb object—and then turn it into a “monster sentence” of at least 100 words. This exercise is straight out of Stanley Fish’s playbook. Use every trick you know to ensure that the sentence is grammatically correct and not a run-on, use long dashes…
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![[no] EVACUATION](https://andpride.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/6a63f392-a122-4892-8aad-ce1eb697441c_1_201_a.jpeg "[no] EVACUATION")
On Wednesdays, the local coastal alarm system broadcasts a cow mooing. This is followed by a man explaining it’s only a test. It’s impossible to ignore, sounding loud even inside the house. The system exists to warn about potential danger, especially tsunamis. During a genuine emergency, we would first hear a siren and then receive…
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Writing Good Nonfiction Sentences… one exercise each Friday. First the necessary introduction. NOTE: several of these exercises are inspired by How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish, Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin, and other sources. A good essay has a goal—to convince, delight, enlighten, instruct, warn, or to review and question.…
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I start this post sitting on the sofa just before 8am. It’s wet out but no longer dark. A reminder: If we were on DST all year around, it would be dark here until almost 9am. Apparently golf courses would make a bundle from after-work greens fees and candy companies are certain that a longer…
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REFLECTION: My nonsense rewriting of Lewis Carroll was tricky only because auto-correct kept fixing my words to make them sensible. I left all the ordinary words—articles and prepositions—while doing my best to watch Carroll’s verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The sensible version was much harder. I went to RhymeZone.com to hunt for my last word. The…
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Writing Good Nonfiction Sentences… one assignment each Friday. NOTE: several of these exercises are inspired by How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish, Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin, and other sources. A good essay has a goal—to convince, delight, enlighten, instruct, warn, or to review and question.…
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Many years ago a famous author commented about the sloppy appearance of women in Washington State, where I went to public schools, Kindergarten through three undergrad degrees. She also talked about Puget Sound, using terminology appropriate to the East coast. Both comments irritated me, but non-locals talking about my corner of the natural world is…
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