Elenia wrote:Ani wrote:Elenia wrote:Try checking out the reviews on Goodreads or babelio.fr for the books on writing advice. Also maybe search specifically for the blogs of authors you like?
As for your sentence idea - it sounds great! I harvest sentences (as I think probably everyone who has even looked at this site before knows!) and I keep on meaning to incorporate them, the words they use or the structures into my own writing. I've never done it systematically before. How exactly were you thinking of using sentences? Maybe we can share tips and motivation - we can perhaps try to post something on our logs each week?
Those are good sites to check. I had forgotten about them. Thanks!
I don't have a great plan yet for using sentences, but I am pondering this in "real life" too, trying to figure out how to teach writing to my children. One of the better reviewed step-by-step methods is from Don & Jenny Killagon. You can see large previews of the books on Amazon (.com). I think I am going to buy the elementary school one as soon as I finish the aforementioned paperwork I need to fill out, and then I'll be able to talk about it a little better. The basic idea is breaking sentences, and then paragraphs, down into chunks and imitating the individual chunks to make new sentences. They just draw slash marks through the sentence separating off the subject, prepositional phrases, compound verbs, adverb clauses, etc. Through the process you end up both seeing and creating dozens (hundreds?) of sentence parts, and get a feel for how they are successfully combined by good writers (if you use good models). I don't want to restrict myself to middle school writing, but I thought to get started I'd work from a couple reading comprehension books I have that are full of poems, short stories, and excerpts for native speaking upper elementary/middle school kids. It would be a work in both grammar and vocab for me as well!
I am totally up for some sort of joint tip/motivation/writing sharing if we think of some way that it works. I see that you post your own writing on your log quite a bit, but unfortunately I can't read any of it :-p
Well, even if we don't think of a way to work together we can motivate and encourage each other I can and probably should post translations, it's just that I'm lazy XD
I would actually be interested in joining y'all, if you'll have me - I've got a 20-lesson style thing for imrpoving writing in German I'd like to work through (and let's face it, I do ok at "dry research monograph" and passable at "manuscript for sermon" but everything else is meh).