Paragraph Party Postmortem
5 Aug
Great party last night. Solid crowd. Good energy. No fights.
Here’s the recap:
I tripped over my own rules when I projected the Hemingway paragraph from yesterday’s post, only to realize that it only contains two sentences and thus violates my three-sentence requirement. I’ll either tweak or dump that rule.
Otherwise the material held up well.
I was especially pleased with the demonstration paragraphs, which we used to help diagnose student work. There are, of course, all kinds of grafs, but it was nice to be able to refer back to the Hemingway (taking care of business), the Clarke (almost pure voice) and the Mason (somewhere in between).
There was another nice moment when we talked about how reading is an unselfconscious act, while writing is a highly selfconscious act. We used this concept to keep us from overthinking our critiques.
It’s easy to put on your smartypants writing hat on and forget that reading is a very simple act. As writers we obsess over every detail, but as readers we’re more inclined to take the text as it comes. This highlights the importance of taking care of the basics.
We’ll see what the evaluations say, but it seemed to me that another strong feature of the class was calling attention to each paragraph’s entrance and exit. Each graf is like a little story. You hook, you build, you resolve (but not too much). In the last example of the night, we were able to radically improve the paragraph simply by cleaning up the out.
That’s all I have for now, my friends. Be good and mind your paragraphs. You are nothing without them.
Great Paragraph Party! Thanks for the new insights and tips!
“As writers we obsess over every detail, but as readers we’re more inclined to take the text as it comes.”
So true, yet so hard to remember in the throes of writing. Wish I could have been at the party, but getting these nuggets here will do nicely.
Glad you’re teaching paragraphs and not spelling — or literature. It’s Ernest Hemingway, not Earnest Hemmingway. Speaking of obsessing over details…
Fixed.
I wouldn’t dump the three-sentence rule or the Hemingway example. Great writers can break the rules, beginners shouldn’t. I think beginners should study the greats and strive to emulate them. Too often, though, beginners think that if Hemingway did it, hey, so can I. No, you can’t just yet. Maybe someday. With a lot of practice. But keep trying.