Day 6 Agenda

Take up paragraph one
Good news
Punctuation Gospel chapter 2
Catchup Day--
+Reviewing your first sentences
+Reviewing your  practice writing
+What you say you need
+Punctuation, diagramming quiz
 

Punctuation Gospel Chapter Two

"Broadcasters pronounce better, but newspaper people punctuate correctly," joked a newspaper journalist.

 After looking at some stories, I'd have to add, "Sometimes." I also know that many of my students have not had grammar since they were in eighth grade. As an old English major who repented and turned to journalism, I know the Gospel of Correct Punctuation may have been amended some for us heretics, but the basics are the same. Correct punctuation is essential for accurate writing—for getting our meaning across (why else would you write?).

So here is Chapter Two of the Revised Version of the Gospel of Punctuation, also known as Clark's Easy Reference Punctuation Guide for Journalists.

Clip it and put it near your computer.

·       Period--Use lots of them. (Short sentences). And after abbreviations. But don't put a period after an abbreviation when it concludes a sentence, as He moved to Washington, D.C..

·       Question mark. Perhaps the easiest one, at the end of a question. Understand? Only difficulty is with quotation marks. See that item, ok? And never use more than one. It’s immature.  Got it????????

·       Semi-colons--avoid because they make for long sentences. Usually break something into shorter sentences for better readability. Two uses-- in a series for clarity when commas are used: He went to Bugtussle, Oklahoma; Dimebox, Texas; and Hell, Michigan. Or in a certain compound sentences --Take only necessary items; leave behind anything heavy. or Holiday traffic has always been dangerous; for instance, 100 died last July 4.
·      Hyphens--Compound adjectives--Thirty-three students, a second-story room.

·       Ellipses--Avoid (…), even when cutting quotes, because people distrust them and think you're leaving out stuff you don't agree with, or are taking out of context. You can choose parts of quotes to use and as long as you don’t change context, there’s no harm: “I’m going to resign tomorrow,” said Superintendent Jones, at the end of a speech on embezzlement.

·       Dashes--Use with caution, when a comma or period won't do, an abrupt break, or for emphasis. Or--as I have done in this article—for lists.

·       The virgule (slash). Hate this sign as in and/or. Again, try to write around it.

·       Parentheses. Don't use them, unless you're William Faulkner (Or are Clark writing this scree on punctuation and he’s already used them several times for clarity).  (See?)  They are stop signs for readers and interrupt the flow of reading. They make for long complicated reading. Make another sentence, or a compound sentence, linked with "and" or but." (But avoid most compound sentences, like parentheses). 

Always ask yourself if you have a question about punctuation, “Why do I need this?” or “Why am I using this?” Most grammatical problems can be cured with short sentences.

Narrative essay

Read this link
Narrative essay

Narrative example-online example

Types of essays

Narrative
Descriptive
Compare and Contrast
Argumentative
How to
Expository--research
Argumentative
Persuasive

Wooden leg essay

My dad had a wooden leg.

The Oklahoma teenager was trying to jump a freight train in Tucumcari, New Mexico in the Depression when he slipped or missed the handhold on the boxcar's open door.

The big steel wheels sliced off his right leg between the ankle and the knee and his little finger on the right hand. Somehow he lived, not bleeding to death, not dying from the pain.  I guess you could say he suffered the rest of his life for that moment, though he didn't talk about it much . . . I never asked him.

I remember him talking about coming home  "to die" and about "feeling sorry for himself," until someone chewed him out and got him "back on his feet again."  He hobbled on crutches for awhile and then eventually got a wooden leg.

It must have been quite a shock emotionally, because a few months earlier, he had been "Iron Man Clark" on the Comanche Indian football team.  Short at five foot nine, he was husky, thick-chested.  He played tackle. You didn't get by him on that scrimmage line.

And now, well now he was a "cripple."

But once he learned to walk again, the wooden leg didn't slow him down.

The family was poor, as were most in Oklahoma those days, but despite the leg, he went to college to study his first love . . . art. They said he learned to draw before he learned to walk.  If you see his early work and sketches from art school, you'd believe it.

     Dad specialized in portraits, later at landscapes.  He never completed a degree--probably running out of money, or perhaps just being too interested in art to finish the other requirements.

     He headed west again and earned a bachelor's living in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Taos, Carlsbad, in bars, hotel lobbies and nightclubs across the state. There he'd do "quick sketches" of whoever would pay, and some who wouldn't.  But 50 cents for a sketch would buy beans and gravy and more in those years and Dad was doing what he liked . . . drawing and traveling and meeting people and talking and living free in "God's Country."

When the War started, instead of going off to fight the enemy like his brothers did in the Pacific, he stayed at home . . . although he tried to enlist.  The Army didn't want a "cripple."  Perhaps the wooden leg saved his life. But he did his part, getting a job with Consolidated and North American Aircraft in Fort Worth, doing some of the drafting on the big B-24 Liberator bombers and the sleek P-51 Mustang fighters, aircraft that helped win the war.

And the cripple also drew a portrait of famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle with a background war scene.  That portrait sold a million dollars of War Bonds in Dallas in 1944, and Ernie Pyle autographed the portrait for the "crippled" artist.  The portrait was given to Pyle and ended up in the correspondent's Albuquerque home, where his wife eventually burned it.

Years later, Clark and his family moved back to New Mexico where he could draw and paint landscapes in his leisure time.

His wooden leg became the brunt of jokes, which he enjoyed.  Even though he was a cripple, he went deer hunting in the New Mexico mountains with some archer friends one year. Someone wrote a humorous poem that if Clark didn't kill the deer with his arrows, he could beat it to death with his wooden leg.  He laughed.  We all did.

And the joke was on the others too.  Like the big dog that tried to bite his leg one day when he was riding to work on his motorbike. "You should have seen his expression," Dad laughed.

     Most people didn't know about his leg. But every once in awhile when the wooden leg started acting up or a blister on the stump would form because of a slipped stump sock, he'd have to go to work or to church on crutches, his right trouser leg pinned up. People would stare in horror, thinking that something horrible had happened.

It had, a long time ago, but Dad had learned to live with it and if he was a cripple, it didn't affect the way he lived much.

He was a talented landscape and portrait artist with a keen eye for details, color and realism . . . that was his love, that and the big blue skies and rolling vistas and rugged mesas and mountains of New Mexico.  Everywhere he went there was beauty to be captured by his paints, his pencils.

That was before they had invented the use of the words "handicapped"  or “disabled.” Dad was neither handicapped nor disabled  He was so nervous that he had to hold his hand still as he painted, but he was not handicapped. Certainly not disabled. He was a cripple, physically, but he worked around it and most people never knew.

There's no disgrace in being a "cripple" or in the word itself.  I look at Dad's paintings and art work every day in my home and my office and see no disgrace, and rarely think of the wooden leg.  "Cripple" may not be a pleasant word--it is jarring, perhaps painfully accurate--but it describes nothing disgraceful.

You see, Dad had a wooden leg.  He was a "cripple."  So what?

Day 5 agenda

Your sentence
Paragraphing
Types of essays
Organizing
Samples
Grabbing my attention--that first sentence
Diagramming, punctuation quiz
Assignment--First paragraph