Is Our Children Learning?
Nov. 9th, 2008 01:19 pmYamaraashi-chan's sixth grade class is studying writing. This entertains Omaha and I to no end. We have rectified some of Yamaraashi-chan's misunderstandings by introducing her to the non-fiction section of our Writer's Digest collection, but the little booklet her teacher gave her was a pretty good introduction.
In fact, it was so good that I photocopied sections of it. Sometimes, we adult writers can benefit from the experiences and even the materials used to educate children. There are whole lists of concepts and first-tier adjectives and verbs associated with them, which I've decided to keep. While the thesaurus is a rockin' resource, sometimes linking "sadness" and "unloved" isn't as easy as it sounds. Having these lists is a good start, a second-tier intellectual starting point to exploring Roget's world.
There is one section that I take offense to, however. What it says is simply so wrong that I worry it will distort my kid's writing habits for years to come. The school, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to ban a word from my child's creative writing. That word is "said." The section is entitled, "Said is dead," has a big picture of the wordsaid stricken out (just like that) and instead provides an entire page, in 8-point arial, of alternatives to "said."
If you google for the phrase, "just use said," you'll find hundreds of published writers more or less agreeing: "Just use 'said'." Dialogue isn't like the description of any other action, and the content of a dialogue is contained in the dialogue itself. The rest of each paragraph in a dialogue contains things the characters do. We use "said" as furniture, the simplest way, short of writing a play with stage directions, to indicate who is speaking. You don't want to write "Jim argued," you want to write dialogue in which Jim argues. If a character "restates" something, just write the dialogue twice.
I may ask her teacher about this.
In fact, it was so good that I photocopied sections of it. Sometimes, we adult writers can benefit from the experiences and even the materials used to educate children. There are whole lists of concepts and first-tier adjectives and verbs associated with them, which I've decided to keep. While the thesaurus is a rockin' resource, sometimes linking "sadness" and "unloved" isn't as easy as it sounds. Having these lists is a good start, a second-tier intellectual starting point to exploring Roget's world.
There is one section that I take offense to, however. What it says is simply so wrong that I worry it will distort my kid's writing habits for years to come. The school, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to ban a word from my child's creative writing. That word is "said." The section is entitled, "Said is dead," has a big picture of the word
If you google for the phrase, "just use said," you'll find hundreds of published writers more or less agreeing: "Just use 'said'." Dialogue isn't like the description of any other action, and the content of a dialogue is contained in the dialogue itself. The rest of each paragraph in a dialogue contains things the characters do. We use "said" as furniture, the simplest way, short of writing a play with stage directions, to indicate who is speaking. You don't want to write "Jim argued," you want to write dialogue in which Jim argues. If a character "restates" something, just write the dialogue twice.
I may ask her teacher about this.
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