Next Noble Pen Meeting

December 29th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

The Iowa Writers House (not the famous I. W. Workshop) is an organization based in Iowa City that offers resources for area writers.  They have announced spring workshop events (for $).  They have a series of free get-togethers, including one at the Cedar Rapids library on second Wednesday evenings (sorry I wasn’t alerted to prior ones).  The focus is not on critique of projects like our group, but you might be interested in rubbing elbows with other writers.

Victories

Cuin has been exchanging research e-mails with a former police chief in regards to her
current piece which has helped her a lot.  Her B+ paper got over turned to an A and she aced the course without her having to appeal it.

Uriah has fixed some of the POV shifts in his piece.

Cassie bought a cover for another story.  She started working on a novella for an anthology open call.

Education

Back in my schooling, shortly after the dinosaurs died, the English teacher had us diagram sentences.  While not exciting work, it does help teach the relationship of the words and phrases., which in turn aids creation and punctuation of sentences that are easy to read.   If the diagram is too messy, a reader will probably stumble while parsing the sentence.  I’ve forgotten the details and never done it out of school, but the concepts learned have helped me a great deal in constructing my sentences.

The basic idea is to place the subject, verb (predicate), and object (if any) on a line separated by break lines.  Then modifiers (adjectives on nouns, adverbs on verbs, and subordinate clauses if any) are attached below those words.

This page summarizes the steps and here’s another explanation.  Here are a bunch of examples.   Wikipedia has some history and an alternative diagram.

You don’t really understand something until you can take it apart and put it back together correctly. ~old saying

Upcoming Schedule

Dec 29
Dakota
Ciuin
Aime W.

Jan 5
Laura
Nick
Uriah

Jan 12
Open slots

Jan 19
Open slots

Jan 26
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill