Ready? Set. Write! My writing students at Mosaic Freeschool began their noveling adventures last Friday! See National Novel Writing Month. You can see what they’ve been up to this fall by reading our update on Mosaic Minutes. This is my third year teaching writing to homeschoolers. I love working with homeschooled students!
National Novel Writing Month coming soon National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a., NaNoWriMo, is almost upon us! What is NaNoWriMo, you ask? According to the Young Writers Program website, NaNoWriMo is: National Novel Writing Month happens every November! It’s a fun, seat-of-your-pants writing event where the challenge is to complete an entire novel in
"Let's talk!" (About great dialogue) A few weeks ago, we gave you some basic pointers on how to punctuate dialogue. Now that you know where the periods and end quotes go, it’s time to understand how we can make our dialogue more interesting to read! First of all, good dialogue does a few important
"Let's talk!" How to punctuate dialogue We could write several articles on how to write good dialogue for a story, but first we need to know how to punctuate dialogue! Here are five basic rules to get you started: 1) Use a comma between your dialogue and the tag line. What’s a tag line? The
Tense up! Another problem we see cropping up in papers is verb tense consistency — it might seem obvious, but surprisingly, this mistake is made more often than you might think. A real-life example from a student: “Bonfires were lit to praise the sun because the days were getting shorter and the sun
"War" by Ariana, Age 13 Occasionally, with the author’s permission, we will share exceptional writing. To submit a piece for consideration, please contact us and provide your first name and age (if under 18). Submissions should be 500 words or less. I wake up to the cry of my little brother who lies beside
Mixing it up This week’s quick tip comes from a problem we see creeping up too often in papers these days: mixing singular nouns or pronouns with plural nouns or pronouns (or vice versa). For instance, can you spot the problems in the following sentences? If they were wealthy, men would be
Who or whom? Rarely do we use whom in everyday conversation. Let’s face it. When is the last time you heard someone say (or heard yourself say) “Whom did you speak with on the telephone this afternoon?” Huh? Still, even though we may choose not to use whom when chatting with (or
To write or to spell? That is the question! One thing that we see a lot of confusion over is whether to write out numbers in numeral form or to spell them. Unfortunately, while there are a few basic rules to follow, there are several accepted methods of addressing this issue. The biggest thing to remember is that whatever
Welcome Welcome to The Writer’s Community. Each week we will post a help topic that relates in some way to writing — it may be a tip for improving your writing, or we may discuss some common mistakes we are seeing in our submissions. It could be as simple as a
