writing about our writing

#1 EXERCISE: DEBRIEF

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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 site offers many options for rhyming 1-, 2-, and multi-syllabic rhymes. I replaced a conjunction “and” with a preposition “with” and that felt like cheating. My use of “still” doesn’t quite work—the entire last line doesn’t work. And this is because I wrote it backwards—I found the words first instead of the meaning. What was I thinking? I hope you didn’t do that.

Reflection, metacognition, thinking about thinking. Thinking about writing. What works, what might work next time.

Perhaps I should call these “exercises” instead of “assignments” since I think many people have issues concerning assignments?

This is a creek that carries water from what used to be two creeks (Shark and Asbury) on my old map. There is a huge iron barricade to prevent (usually) drift logs from being carried upstream. That’s what you can see at the top of the image. In the foreground is the stump of an ancient tree, perhaps four feet across (not around, but across!) that Gary and I had never seen uncovered before. There are other “ghost trees” along the coast. Perhaps, as was suggested by visitors, these are remains from the tsunami resulting from the earthquake that occurred along the Cascadia subduction zone on January 26, 1700 with an estimated magnitude of 8.7–9.2. …Or not.
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