“You don’t have to be great to start. But you have to start to be great.” – Zig Ziglar
Everyone has a story in them; it is up to each of us to find our story and write it down.
Our Discussion:
We continued the discussion around the use of punctuation, covering the little thing called a comma. I am not sure we were not more confused afterwards. This was because there are no hard and fast rules, but there are 10 common ways to use commas. Some purist grammarians can be fairly strict about some uses. Even so, some of the conventions need to be broken sometimes. A great example is the need to include a comma in the sentence ‘Let’s eat Grandma’. Without a comma after ‘eat’, we are planning to eat grandma! So, we need the comma so it makes sense and reads ‘Let’s eat, Grandma’.
Our Challenge:
Having discussed some of the ways to use commas, we tackled a quiz on using commas correctly. This added to the conversation as we recognised placement of a comma can depend on the context.
Some of our Stories:
It is always interesting when some similar themes come up in our writing. This month a number of stories ended with an adventure about to start.
1.I/June found the message in a bottle:
The message in a bottle was a popular topic, varying from finding the bottle in a backyard that had not been there the day before, a bottle found in the river and a bottle found at the beach. There was also one around a large number of bottles washed up on the beach. Here they were used to hide ‘dad jokes’ and encourage the local scouts to find them for recycling to raise funds. The scouts ended up taking over the role of cleaning up the beach after the summer visitors.
2.How could something like that happen?:
A story about a collision at sea after crews on both ships being distracted by an aerobatic display overhead. A second story talked about a visit to Squeaky Beach and discovering the cause of the squeak.
3.The hand of fate stepped in to…:
This prompt was used in a story around a dream after watching an SBS series set on a remote Scottish island. The hand advised the protagonist that she had relation buried on the island but not in the church graveyard.
The story of the former prisoner making good after release is continuing with him continuing to find his place in the community. And we had a brief piece around the importance of punctuation, specifically on this occasion the use of a questions mark.
Prompts:
Our prompts for our class on 11 May are:
I will be away for the May class, so I have also set a ‘prompt’ for the 8 June class:
Joy Shirley
Everyone has a story in them; it is up to each of us to find our story and write it down.
Our Discussion:
We continued the discussion around the use of punctuation, covering the little thing called a comma. I am not sure we were not more confused afterwards. This was because there are no hard and fast rules, but there are 10 common ways to use commas. Some purist grammarians can be fairly strict about some uses. Even so, some of the conventions need to be broken sometimes. A great example is the need to include a comma in the sentence ‘Let’s eat Grandma’. Without a comma after ‘eat’, we are planning to eat grandma! So, we need the comma so it makes sense and reads ‘Let’s eat, Grandma’.
Our Challenge:
Having discussed some of the ways to use commas, we tackled a quiz on using commas correctly. This added to the conversation as we recognised placement of a comma can depend on the context.
Some of our Stories:
It is always interesting when some similar themes come up in our writing. This month a number of stories ended with an adventure about to start.
1.I/June found the message in a bottle:
The message in a bottle was a popular topic, varying from finding the bottle in a backyard that had not been there the day before, a bottle found in the river and a bottle found at the beach. There was also one around a large number of bottles washed up on the beach. Here they were used to hide ‘dad jokes’ and encourage the local scouts to find them for recycling to raise funds. The scouts ended up taking over the role of cleaning up the beach after the summer visitors.
2.How could something like that happen?:
A story about a collision at sea after crews on both ships being distracted by an aerobatic display overhead. A second story talked about a visit to Squeaky Beach and discovering the cause of the squeak.
3.The hand of fate stepped in to…:
This prompt was used in a story around a dream after watching an SBS series set on a remote Scottish island. The hand advised the protagonist that she had relation buried on the island but not in the church graveyard.
The story of the former prisoner making good after release is continuing with him continuing to find his place in the community. And we had a brief piece around the importance of punctuation, specifically on this occasion the use of a questions mark.
Prompts:
Our prompts for our class on 11 May are:
- I was wandering around the Op Shop when I saw it
- Confusion reigns supreme
- The hand of fate
I will be away for the May class, so I have also set a ‘prompt’ for the 8 June class:
- Open a book at random. Select a sentence/phrase and use this as your prompt.
Joy Shirley
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