http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/tags/writing-exercise Unstressed Syllables discussion and practice en-US Fri, 10 Sep 2010 19:44:47 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 q http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/search.php http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/topic/writing-exercise-instructions-9#post-18 Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:39:45 +0000 Aaron Pogue 18@http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/ <p>This week, I'm going to call on you to start a blog. If you're here at all, you realize that you're a writer. Maybe not a prolific novelist, maybe not even a willing emailer, but it's your lot in life to do some writing from time to time.</p> <p>Unstressed Syllables is all about helping you get better at that, but all our writing advice can't do much unless you put it into practice. That's why I provide a weekly writing exercise, to get you writing something low-impact that will help you think like a writer.</p> <p>That's the benefit you get from blogging, too, but I'll save that sales pitch for tomorrow's post. For now, I want you to focus on the writing you do.</p> <p>Think about your writing education.</p> <p> * How did you respond to your English classes in school?<br /> * What's the most recent class you've taken that was focused directly on writing?<br /> * What are your weaknesses?</p> <p>Think about your process.</p> <p> * When you've got a document you need to work on, how do you approach it?<br /> * Do you start with prewriting?<br /> * Do you put it off to the last minute?<br /> * Do you research relevant topics? </p> <p>Think about all the ways you have to write in your daily life.</p> <p> * Do you write emails to friends and family?<br /> * Do you write emails for work?<br /> * Do you write business letters for official purposes?<br /> * Do you post to any sort of social media (whether that's Twitter, Facebook status updates, or a private blog)?<br /> * Do you do any other creative or hobby writing?<br /> * What do you enjoy about writing? What do you do well?<br /> * What projects are you working on at the moment?</p> <p>Write up a short autobiography of you as a writer (300-900 words). Make it three sections, with appropriate headings, and generally answer the questions above.Tell us where you're coming from, so we can better help you get where you need to be. </p> http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/topic/writing-exercise-instructions-8#post-17 Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:09:41 +0000 Aaron Pogue 17@http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/ <p>This week we're going to discuss techniques in getting and giving useful criticism, so it might be tempting to put off today's assignment until you've read tomorrow's article. I'd recommend that you go ahead and do your best job now, and then try again after you've read the week's lessons. See what changes, what gets better, and what gets easier.</p> <p>The actual assignment, though, is to critique one of your own documents. Pick something you've written recently and write a short analysis of the document's quality and craftsmanship.</p> <p>Start by reading through your document, and then write one to three paragraphs of analysis on each of the following topics:</p> <p> * Clarity of communication - organization, transitions, good introduction and conclusion, etc.<br /> * Effectiveness of the message - strength of the argument, connection to the reader, etc.<br /> * Elements of style - punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, etc.</p> <p>Refer to or quote the document where appropriate. </p> http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/topic/writing-exercise-instructions-7#post-13 Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:10:41 +0000 Aaron Pogue 13@http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/ <p>Let's have some fun with the writing exercise this time. All that talk about cards on the table has me thinking about the serious drama in every hand of poker.</p> <p>So that's your job this week. Sit down at the poker table with four of your characters -- whether you make up new ones for this assignment or mix and match from your works in progress. In 300-600 words, tell us about one hand, maybe just one round of bidding, but make it intense.</p> <p>Maybe it's relationship drama among the players, or financial drama for our gambling addict protagonist. Maybe it's international espionage coming to a head at the high-stakes table, or a deeply introspective consideration of morality, expressed as an extended metaphor.</p> <p>Whatever your story, show it on the camera. Practice revealing your characters through their actions, not explanations, and give your readers just the hints they need to figure out everybody's hands (literally or figuratively, depending on your plot). </p> http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/topic/writing-exercise-instructions-5#post-10 Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:46:32 +0000 Aaron Pogue 10@http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/ <p>WIPs, or Works-in-Progress, are often the favorite topics of creative writers. I realize now I was a fool to wait so long to invite you to talk about yours!</p> <p>That's this week's Creative Writing exercise, though. In light of our recent discussion of the various stages of manuscript development, I want you to tell me what you've done. Have you written a first draft? Have you toiled through a month of prewriting and put 30,000 words on the page before your project's inner fire flickered out? Have you finished six novels and hundreds of rounds of rewrites?</p> <p>Let me know. If you've only got one WIP, tell me where you are with that one. If you've done more than one, chart it out. It can be amazingly useful to compare the different stages of writing and where you've spent your time on different projects. Compare the amount of prewriting you did to the amount of revision your manuscript needed, or to how many times you abandoned it along the way. Compare how many times you shared your document out for feedback with your completion rate. </p> http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/topic/writing-exercise-instructions-4#post-9 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:40:22 +0000 Aaron Pogue 9@http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/ <p>I talked last week about the importance of writing good introductions to establish context (especially for readability down the line), and that message is never more important (or overlooked) than when you're sitting down to write an email.</p> <p>We still occasionally run into the big formal business letters and memos on company letterhead, and so we're in the habit of thinking of emails, by contrast, as casual communication. It's certainly less work to put together an email, but as a direct result of that most of our official written communication these days takes place in the form of emails.</p> <p>Sure, adding a lot of formal structure to emails would make them just as much of a nuisance as memos and business letters, but at the opposite extreme, leaving out information in the name of convenience will ultimately cause problems.</p> <p>So your exercise for this week is an email context audit. Open up your email client (personal or work, whichever you prefer), and look at the last ten non-reply emails you sent -- that is, new emails starting new conversations. Copy out the opening paragraph of each email, and add it to a list, then read over all the items in the list and see how easy it is for you to tell what each email message is talking about. Chances are good you still remember each of those emails, so try to guess how well you'd be able to figure the meaning out a year from now, too.</p> <p>Then test yourself. Go back one year, and list the opening paragraphs of ten non-reply emails you sent on this date last year. How many of them make sense to you now?</p> <p>This is an audit, a self-evaluation, and there's a real possibility you'll come out of it with a perfect score. If you don't, if you find in your archives a bunch of unintelligible one-line emails or messages that start in the middle of a conversation, take some time to practice improvement. Revisit your ten newer messages, and try writing a short, clear introduction for each of them. </p> http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/topic/writing-exercise-instructions-1#post-3 Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:33:53 +0000 Aaron Pogue 3@http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/ <p>We discussed the business letter format in passing this week, and we'll get to it in more detail in the next week or two, but I'd like to see what you can do now. Maybe you're showing off your chops, proving to me that this blog doesn't have anything to offer you at all. Maybe you're setting up a phenomenal Before and After contrast, stumbling through a crude letter format now so you can really shine once I teach you how to do it right.</p> <p>Either way, have fun with it. Write me a one-page business letter (no more than 250 words, and 100 would probably be acceptable) politely thanking Santa Claus for a gift you received this Christmas, but pointing out a mistake on his part and asking for a full refund. If that's just too silly for you, substitute in your Aunt Edna, or WalMart Corporation. Mainly I want to see how well you can duplicate the business letter format, and how you structure the message in a formal correspondence. </p> http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/topic/writing-exercise-instructions#post-2 Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:31:41 +0000 Aaron Pogue 2@http://www.unstressedsyllables.com/forum/ <p>This week, your assignment is to write me a story in the form of a fictional blog post. With Christmas so much on our minds, it just seems obvious to tell a Christmas story, but I want you to practice some of that "getting better at being a person" that I mentioned earlier in the week.</p> <p>So tell me about your Christmas, but tell me about it from the point of view of someone else who was involved. Tell me the harrowing tale of your brother-in-law who drove in through a blizzard to make it to Christmas dinner at your house, through his eyes. Tell me about the sister who couldn't make it, or the random cashier at the grocery store who offered a surprisingly exuberant "Merry Christmas" as you made your way through the checkout line.</p> <p>Write a blog post of 200 to 600 words titled "My Christmas" and write it as though you're somebody else. It's good practice at blogging, good practice at writing from a set point of view, and good practice at seeing the world through your fellow man's eyes -- and that's certainly something worth doing at Christmastime. </p>