Friday, November 06, 2009

Friday poetry challenge: advice for writers

Today Bardiac offers up A Poem for Grading (read it here), quite appropriate considering that my primary task today and tomorrow is to respond to eight more freshman drafts, a dozen honors humor theory papers, and 24 postcolonial essays. I'm thinking about making it more interesting by writing all my comments on papers in verse.

A quatrain on comma splices:

To join complete sentences
requires strong glue.
Semicolons work wonders,
but commas won't do.

A little moody blues:

When you write about conditions contrary to fact
Oh, when you write about conditions contrary to fact
Yes, when you write about conditions contrary to fact
If I were you, dude,
I'd choose the subjunctive mood.

A transitional haiku:

Wide chasms between
paragraphs? Build a bridge to
keep me from falling.

Now it's your turn: verse of any kind providing advice to writers of any kind.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What happens after a panda
Eats, shoots & leaves?
His victim’s distraught mama
Starves, cries & grieves.
If a carelessly used comma
Can cause a mother so much pain,
We novices must do what we can
To learn …so the victim’s death won’t be in vain.
A special shout out to Brit, Lynn Truss
For pointing out high the stakes can be.
When punctuation marks can save lives,
We must be sure to use them properly!

Sure hope I punctuated that correctly! :) Happy Friday! Betsy

Anonymous said...

Um, no comma after Brit, please.

:-]

Stacey Lee Donohue said...

As if we have time
for a poetry challenge
with grading and all.


;-)

But thank you, Bev, for the idea!

Anonymous said...

Well, thanks, for pointing out my comma happy ways, Anon! :) I appreciate it! (I have a child who believes he was issued a finite number of punctuation marks to last him the next 70+ years, so he rations them. For example, a 100 word rambling discourse about why he likes a particular band will include exactly one punctuation mark - a period. My son is also quite stingy with capital letters, well, with all letters really. Everything is lower case with him and much of what he writes is abbreviated. I can't tell you how delighted he would be to find out that I put too many punctuation marks in a sentence. So...on his behalf: "u rock anon."

I also accidentally omitted the word "how" in that same Lynn Truss sentence. How ironic that there would be so many errors in a sentence inspired by such a stickler for good grammar!

In my defense, I think it was quite brave of me to post a poem about punctuation on a website frequented by English professors. I think I should also point out that, though poor grammar can cost lives, as Truss so humorously noted, it didn't in this case.

If you must know, I actually choose to punctuate incorrectly every now and then. I don't want everyone to be so dazzled by my brilliance that they'll feel uncomfortable. Did anyone believe that? :) Hope so!

Apologies in advance for any errors in this post. Have a great Saturday!

A humbled, yet appreciative :), Betsy