Winding down
May 31, 2006
As your last few weeks as seniors, think about your duration here, and describe what you’ll miss most about Galileo.
The Great Campaign
May 25, 2006
http://www.galileoweb.org/arquillos/stories/storyReader$341
Rough Drafts
May 24, 2006
There is nothing you need to post today, but you must type up your rough drafts, print them, and bring them to class.
A Character
May 23, 2006
We all know someone who is a “character”, someone who makes us laugh
and giddy inside. Describe the person or persons who make you
laugh.
Visitors
May 22, 2006
We’ve all had visitors… some we’ve expected, and others who have
caught us off guard, some we’ve known, and others who are complete
strangers. Describe a visitor you’ve had in your life. Be
sure to use your five senses.
Bulwer-Lytton Sentences
May 19, 2006
You were to compose two Bulwer-Lytton Sentences, otherwise known as the
“worst possible opening sentence for a novel”. As a class, we
read an article which categorized aspects of “bad writing”, such as:
anticlimax, wordiness, misplaced modifiers, overblown triteness and
parody. Try to work within the genres that we discussed in class:
Adventure, Romance, Science Fiction, Western, and Mystery.
Write your two sentences and post them online. Be sure to also have them handy to go over in class.
Examples:
It was a dark, dreary, rainy, stormy, muddy, lightning-boltish, cloudy,
foggy, thunderish night at Herman’s old mansion. He had invited his
long lost twin over for dinner this awful night, he had never seen her
before. She was ten hundred times as big as Big Bertha. He greeted
her at the door but she couldn’t fit so he got his crow bar and pried
her through the door, in the process she landed on top of him and
killed the little fragile man. Just then she started screaming,
“I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” a shadow shone in the moonlight…
and she thought… is somebody going to come kill me.
Yes but the knife got caught in al her blubber and she unfortunately
survived, but who stabbed her?
The tall, handsome man with a dark mustache and dark, coarse hair
sticking out of the edge of his brown, weathered cowboy hat waved
goodbye to his newly-wed wife as he climbed upon his sturdy brown
horse and rode off into the unknown, deserted desert, not knowing
that ahead of him were the most fearsome tribe of Indians in the
West, and in less than an hour he would be lying in the middle of the
desert with an arrow sticking out of his heart and the dust blowing
over his body and eventually covering him and his wife never being
able to find him.
Inside/Outside
May 17, 2006
How much of your inner self do you actually think you allow others to
see? Is it easy to allow ourselves to expose our little
idiosyncrasies?
First Sentences
May 15, 2006
Using the internet, search for opening sentences of novels. You
may choose any genre of novel, but you must find three opening
sentences. After each sentence, list the title of the novel from
which it was derived.
Fables
May 10, 2006
In its strict sense a fable is a short story or folk
tale embodying a moral, which may be expressed explicitly at the end as
a maxim. “Fable” comes from Latin fabula and shares a root with faber,
“maker, artificer.” Thus, though a fable may be conversational in tone,
the understanding from the outset is that it is an invention, a created
fiction. A fable may be set in verse, though it is usually prose. In
its pejorative sense, a fable is a deliberately invented or falsified
account.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fables
What fables do you recall from your youth?
Themes
May 9, 2006
There a too many themes about which one could write a short
story. Choose your top three favorite themes, list them, define
what you interpret them to be in a plot, and then state why you chose
those three.
