If a person follows my blog for any length of time, he or she will discover that I have little patience for absolute statements or generalizations. They tend to turn me into a rebel. I become determined to prove the statement wrong. That happens to be the case with the following statement: “All people are deadline driven and time oriented.”
Archives for April 2012
Hurting the Dear Ones
When I started to take my writing and my role as a writer seriously, I neglected one teeny-tiny detail: I inevitably was going to hurt those closest to me. I didn’t realize this truth until I allowed some family members to read a couple of my early poems, and they responded with both hurt feelings and concern. It was at that point I had to make a decision. Would I continue writing and risk hurting my dear ones or would I cease and desist from my writing?
Write Right and the Peeps
Word Games for Word Nerds
One of my favorite homework assignments in the third grade was using the week’s vocabulary list in some sort of story. I found the assignment to be entirely too much fun. I don’t think I enjoyed the endless repetition of writing the words and their definitions, but I did like using them in sentences. To this day I enjoy such assignments, although they’re never quite as strict. It’s usually some sort of exercise I create for myself in which I have to use a certain word, a type of phrasing, or even a punctuation mark, such as the dreaded exclamation point.
Write Right: A Quagmire of Quotation Marks
I’ve been known to use the quotation mark symbol with my fingers to make a point – usually a sarcastic one – but I’m always amused when I see flagrant abuse and misuse of quotation marks. “Do ‘not’ park here”? I have to wonder what the writer was thinking. Perhaps the writer was trying to add emphasis. Unfortunately, the quotation mark was not the solution to the problem. The quotation mark was not only necessary but also made the entire statement suspect.
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Do You Have an Accountability Partner?
An accountability partner is a kick-ass partner. It’s the person who’s going to tell you the truth even when it hurts. It’s the person who’s going to be there when nobody else is. It’s the person who’s going to hold your hand and, for lack of a better phrase, kick your ass when you need it.