SEM2 Q4 #5: EXPLORING THE WRITTEN WORD — ALL CLASSES

NEW RULES for 4th QUARTER for ALL ENTRIES:

• 1 entry for a “C”; 2 entries for a “B”; 3 entries for an “A”.
• Length:  Each entry must be a minimum of 3 full paragraphs
• Paragraphs:  Each paragraph must be 5+ sentences.
• Any entry that is less than 3 paragraphs — and entries with paragraphs less than 5 sentences – are not guaranteed credit.

Challenge: Pick one of these quotations about writing that catches your eye.  Offer a reaction:

Quote 1: “Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.” – Nadine Gordimer

Quote 2: “Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.” – Don Delillo

Quote 3: “If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average” – Derek Walcott

SEM 2, W3, #6: THE WRITTEN WORD

While we spend a great deal of time on the ‘techniques’ of writing, we must never forget that writing is as much an ‘attitude about life’ as it is a set of skills.

Challenge: Pick one of these quotations about writing that catches your eye.  Offer a reaction.

Length: 7+ sentences:

Option 1:

“What I don’t write is as important as what I write.” — Jamaica Kincaid

Option 2:

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” — Scott Adams

Option 3:

“I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it.” — John Cage

W10, #3: THE WRITTEN WORD

Who: All periods

Set-up: While we spend a great deal of time on the ‘techniques’ of writing, we must never forget that writing is as much an ‘attitude about life’ as it is a set of skills.

Challenge: Pick one of these quotations about writing that catches your eye.  Offer a reaction.

Length: 7+ sentences:

Option 1:

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.” — Vita Sackville-West

Option 2:

“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.” — Vladimir Nabakov

Option 3:

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” — Anton Chekhov

W9, #7: THE WRITTEN WORD

Who: Periods 1, 2, 3, 4, & 7

Set-up: While we spend a great deal of time on the ‘techniques’ of writing, we must never forget that writing is as much an ‘attitude about life’ as it is a set of skills.

Challenge: Pick one of these quotations about writing that catches your eye.  Offer a reaction.

Length: 7+ sentences:

Option 1:

“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.” — Anais Nin

Option 2:

“A word is not the same with one writer as with another.  One tears it from his guts.  The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.” — Charles Peguy

Option 3:

“What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.  — Logan Pearsall Smith, “All Trivia”, Afterthoughts, 1931