Even though it is a depressing title, it is a fairly interesting novel.

Chinua Achebe writes about the transitional time period when one culture gives way to another, thereby allowing itself to die.  In this text we learn about the Ibo people, but we learn in parables or proverbs.

We will talk more of this after break, but don't forget that tomorrow is ORB DAY!!

BYOBook!!

Have a great week off!!  Merry Christmas!

-mrs. Coller

The basics of the ACTION VERB brush stroke: Do not use linking verbs, but action verbs instead.

Linking Verbs:
am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been, have, has, had, seems, appears, etc.

Sample:  The child was enraptured with Christmas.

-The problem is that the author TOLD me about the kid, but didn't SHOW me the truth of the matter.

Instead, the author should write something like this:

**The boy gleefully ran to hug his Grandmother when she walked in the door for Christmas dinner.

The following excerpt is from Treasure Island, but some of the words have been changed into linking verbs for the purpose of this exercise.  Your job is to rework this paragraph using ACTION VERBS instead of the words in bold.

I remember him as if it were yesterday.  He was tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man.  What was noticeable was his jet black pigtail and his soiled blue coat.  He had a handspike.  His hands were rugged and scarred with black broken nails, and there was a cut across one cheek of a dirty, livid white.

Yesterday, I was laying on my couch all day sniffling and trying to get rid of a headache.  For class, the substitute teacher, a wonderfully helpful woman, told you to practice your brush strokes while writing a story about your holiday shopping experience, and then another paragraph summarizing your previous text.

Today, however, we dove in to yet another brush stroke: the PARTICIPLE.  To form a participle, you want to think of an ABSOLUTE PHRASE WITHOUT THE NOUN at the beginning.  Instead of EYES WATERING (an absolute), you'd write, "Watering up with tears, her eyes showed me just how proud she was of her daughter."  Basically, a participle is an ING PHRASE before a sentence.

Another way you can create a participle is by writing three ING words in a row, all describing the main subject of the sentence.  Examples:

*Trembling, shaking, crying, the boy walked home in the dark.
*Laughing, spinning, reeling, the young bride thought of her beloved husband and how much she loved him.

See if you can create your own sentences about a car moving along a road.  Create sentence #1 with a PARTICIPLE PHRASE.  Then create sentence #2 with three participles in a row.

Have a good day!
-Mrs. Coller

Let's say that you see WILHELM standing over by his locker.  You could write in your diary, "WILHELM is so cool.  I really like him.  He is the captain of the chess team."

But the problem is that these are third grade sentences.  Your writing would be okay, but not excellent, and certainly not skilled.

So how do you fix this?

Let's think of some other ways we can talk about WILHELM without saying the name WILHELM.

1. the captain of the chess team
   
2. the boy with the snowman sweater on
3. the gorgeous German kid
4. the boy I like

All of those (1-4) are NOUN PHRASES which are a group of words that, together, act like a NOUN.

Now, don't forget that we are learning BRUSH STROKES here, which will help us to write on a more sophisticated level.  Let's take the noun WILHELM and add a noun phrase from the list.  We'll put BOTH of them in the sentence together, and then we will seem RIDICULOUSLY INTELLIGENT to whoever happens to read the diary.

Sample: I really like WILHELM, THE CAPTAIN OF THE CHESS TEAM.

You stated the noun - WILHELM - and then you put a comma and RENAMED the same noun - the captain of the chess team.

Other examples:
Mrs. Coller, my English teacher, forces us to write using brush strokes.
The Bills, the best football team out there, will probably go to every Superbowl for the next fifteen years.
The kid with the green sweatshirt, my brother, tried to trip me in the hallway.
I tend to take after my grandfather, a man who has been gone for twenty years now.
George Washington, the leader of a brave troop of soldiers, faced may troubles during his presidency.

So... do you think you have it?  To TEST YOURSELF:
Cover up the FIRST use of the noun or noun phrase.  If the sentence is still grammatically correct and makes sense, you can be POSITIVE that you have an APPOSITIVE!

This is an example of a sentence that DOES NOT use an APPOSITIVE:  The boy, tall and handsome, looked my way.


In this case, if you cover up the first noun or noun phrase, you end up with:
**Tall and handsome looked my way.


This DOES NOT WORK, so you do not have an appositive, even though the original sentence is a good sentence. 

To practice, see if you can make up sentences like this.  

1. Write a sentence (using an appositive) which talks about Kate's attitude at the end of The Taming of the Shrew.
2. Write an appositive sentence which explains Sly and his adventures.
3. Write an appositive sentence which answers the question, "Why do we 

Have a great day!
-Mrs. Coller

As I told you at the beginning of the year, there are 6 TRAITS OF GOOD WRITING:

1. Ideas
   
2. Organization
   
3. Conventions (grammar. spelling, punctuation)
   
4. Voice
   
5. Sentence Structure
   
6. Word Choice
   

Today we began learning 5 BRUSH STROKES that will help you enhance your sentence structure.

1. Absolutes
2. Appositives
3. Participles
4. Adjectives Out of Order
5. Action Verbs

An ABSOLUTE (in equation form):
           ABSOLUTE = Noun + ing adjective
                                 OR
           ABSOLUTE = Noun + ed adjective

Use TWO absolutes at the beginning OR two absolutes at the end of your core sentence to increase your skill in writing sentences.

Samples:

1. Engine spitting, gears grinding, the car went into the parking lot.
2. Joints aching, headache pulsing, the little old lady left the chaotic Crunch game.
3. Eyelids closing, mind drifting, the boy attempted to stay awake for three days.
4. Muscles clenched, skin drenched, the sweaty man made his way to the top of the high peak.

If you were not in class, try this on your own.  Find a good image on Google, and write a sentence about it. Baby steps:
*Determine your basic sentence.
*Think about what parts of the image you would zoom in to if you had a camera.  These will be the nouns you use for your absolutes.
*Determine an -ING word or -ED word for each of your two nouns.  Put them together to form your AWESOME ABSOLUTE sentence.
*Be happy that you ROCK.

We will work on more brush strokes tomorrow and all next week.  Then we will use these types of sentences to answer quiz questions and write papers, not only in ELA, but also in LIFE!!

Have a great night.
-Mrs. Coller

Today in class we used each student as a living breathing thesaurus.  We circled wording in our own sonnets that needed to be brought up a level.  Then, in groups, we brainstormed to determine more creative options using imagery and visualization.

Tonight, you do not have homework, but I will give you this sonnet to complete (typed, Times New Roman 12 pt font) for Thursday.

Have a great half day!!
-Mrs. Coller