by Fitz | Dec 8, 2019 | Essays, The Crafted Word Blog, Workshops
Good writers borrow. Great writers steal…
And for these essays you are writing, steal from yourself.
All of you–both my 8th and 9th grades students–are smack dab in the middle of writing your essays. Everybody is under the gun timewise to finish these essays, so make your life easier: do not reinvent the wheel. You already made a bunch of wheels.
You guys in my 8th grade classes have reams of reflections about The Odyssey; likewise, my 9th grade class has already written quite a bit about Walden. Use what you have written. Steal your thoughts and recreate them in (perhaps) a more polished and structured form–a literary analysis paragraph!
I do it all the time. And I have yet to be caught and punished.
These essays should not require you to learn or study anything new. No writer writes well about anything he or she does not understand–even though they think they do–so just use some of the stuff you have already written and make them ready for the big time.
No joy for the writer. No joy for the reader. (oops…sorry Robert Frost.)
by Fitz | Dec 2, 2019 | Essays, The Crafted Word Blog, Workshops
Read. Write…and now CREATE and SHARE…
Few of you would bake a cake and not eat it. Most of you, especially if you are proud of your cake, would want to share your cake.
This is basically the idea behind your Odyssey Portfolio. Create something awesome. Share it.
A good protfolio is more than cut and paste. It is thoughful design. Rethinking. Redoing. Reimagining.
Anything can be made better.
And that is a good metaphor for life….
Here are couple of suggestions “if” you are interested.
Every museum has a main door, and that door is usually pretty interesting. I would consider using a separate page or even a blog as your welcome page. However, it should not be a blog with a bunch of posts, but rather a page that introduces and welcome readers/viewers to your Odyssey Portfolio. It may even be a place where you can put the video you have yet to create.
Consider making a page or pages for your writing pieces. It could be one page that a reader can scroll thorugh; it could be several different pages collated with analysis on one page, reflections on another, etc–or you could have a separate page for each writing piece.
The bottom line is that this is your portfolio, and it should refelct your taste, skills, and content.
We will have time to work on this in class on Friday, too.
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