You may be wondering how we go about writing all these blog entries. It's not all that easy. Everyone has different difficulties in life, and I often struggle with writer's block. Recently, it took me four hours to get a single paragraph on the page of my AIMS writing practice test, and I am more than certain that I don't have more than four hours to finish it.
So back to the question of how do we do it. We always start with prewriting and brainstorming ideas for our topics. Once we have six or seven topic ideas, we sit down at the dining room table and discuss what we came up with for topics and how they would work. After we have narrowed down the ideas to about two or three, we do a quick cluster graph to get specific ideas about what we want to write about. Next, we draw an outline about what's going to be in each paragraph and how we're going to write it. Finally, I sit down at the computer and actually write it. If an outline was written, then this should cause the writer almost no problems because he or she pretty much already wrote it.
As I wrote in paragraph one, I often struggle with writer's block. Along with this problem, I also have trouble keeping my writing organized, and Rebecca also admits she suffers from that flaw, too. However, this isn't her biggest flaw. Her biggest "flaw" is her love to write. Her latest idea at our little writer's workshop was the "Camp-outs and Camp-ins" idea. Instead of my mom's suggestion for her to write about the latest camp-outs and sleep-overs, she wanted to write about "all the camp-outs" in her life! Current camp-out and sleep-over toll estimate: 2,000,362. Another example of this "flaw" happened when she received a writing assignment to write a short story about The Water Horse by Dick King Smith and began writing My Night With the Loch Ness Monster which according to her was supposed to become a 24 chapter book until my mom told her to end this copy and write the book when it wasn't due in two days.
So now you know how we go about writing our blog entries, but if you do get stumped writing your own blog or whatever it is you need to write, we found two books to be extremely useful quick references and guides. The first is Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing by Mignon Fogarty which is possibly the world's most useful grammar quick reference ever made. She starts by writing the grammar rule, and then moves onto explanations of why you use the rule. She then shows you how the rule would make no sense the wrong way, and then writes a sentence using the rule with her characters Aardvark the aardvark and Squiggly the snail. We were lucky enough to go to one of her book signings late last year where we learned that she started her writing career by doing podcasts in her closet because her clothes blocked out background noise and the small space amplified her voice (one of the questions I remember best at the signing was if she got a tax deduction for her clothes because they supported her business.) While we were there we also bought her latest book The Grammar Devotional and got it signed by her. We then bought the book The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier by Bonnie Trenga who was invited as an up and coming local author. We also got her book signed. Another good writing book we found was Writing Smart Junior by C. L. Brantley which is a book about three characters named Bridget, Babette, and Barnaby going on an adventure with their fat cat Beauregaurd to save the lost art of writing. It also happens to be where we got the outline idea for our writing process.
So as you can see there is no longer much mystery behind how we go about writing these blog entries since I just told you exactly how we do it. I hope this will help you!
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