National Day on Writing

Pen to Paper
Creative Commons License Photo Credit: mbgrigby via Compfight

Raise your hand if you knew today, October 20th, is the National Day on Writing.  I admit, at 7:00 this morning, I would not have been able to raise my hand.  However, it didn’t take long between emails, tweets, and blogs to learn that today is, in fact, a special occasion, especially for all writers and for those aspiring to be writers.

Happy National Day on Writing!

In honor of the day, let’s share the writing we’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks and then use these tips to create some new writing.

 

DSCN2979

Analyzing and evaluating our writing

Analyzing and evaluating our writing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These are examples of blog comments we wrote last week.  We analyzed them in four parts:

I. Did we create imagery for the reader? (specific nouns, verbs, adjectives/adverbs; figures of speech)

II. Did we make the reader think?  (details and examples to support ideas)

III. Did we engage the reader? (variety of sentence structures)

IV. Did we organize our material for the reader? (beginning, middle, end)

We evaluated our writing using FOCUS.  An essay that scores a 1 is not very FOCUSed; a score of 6 is quite FOCUSed.

Focus: on topic

Organization: introduction, body, conclusion

Content: supporting examples and details

Usage: proper grammar and mechanics

Style: mature vocabulary, variety of sentence structure, figures of speech

Finally, we identified specific areas that we improved since last week, and explained how we plan to continue to improve.

In honor of National Day on Writing, a most happy occasion, let’s listen to some writing from some American Authors that you may have heard before:

Would you consider today, the National Day on Writing, to be the best day of your life?

If not, what is the best day of your life so far?