Revision

REVISION OF YOUR STORY

“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.”
― Raymond Chandler

Many of you have a goal to expand your ideas.  Let's brainstorm how you can expand your ideas in simple ways.  A good place to start is with the expansion of your sentences so that they provide more details to your reader.  We will go over a passage, looking how to improve the sentences below and think about how to make them more descriptive.  And, we will look at sentences, tone, and purpose.

This is a short, unedited, first draft passage of, An Unfulfilled Life by Donna Moreau (I'll give you a hard copy to work with.

INSTRUCTIONS – with a partner

1.      Identify the types and structures of sentences.  If you do this correctly, you will notice that there are a couple of structural problems – mostly dependent clauses.

2.     What is the tone of this paragraph?  Circle the words that set the tone.

3.     What is the purpose of this section? 

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Once, when we lived in a Quonset hut in Japan, before my younger sister was born, she displayed motherly instincts.  Thousands of Quonset huts were manufactured during WWII.  They were made of corrugated, galvanized steel and could be thrown up quickly and without ceremony anywhere in the world the US military stakes residence. They look like rippled tubing, cut in half - a semi-circle of efficiency.  The Quonset hut screamed grey unlimited coldness and (were shaped like a tin can cut in half, lengthwise). Insulation was a problem and often the huts were placed on concrete slabs.  The opposite of a Hobbit house where warm fires and colorful decor created a cozy and welcoming atmosphere. Where outsides were surrounded by bright flowers, velvety moss-covered roofs set in a land kissed by a warm, cheerful sun.  They were bitterly cold in the winter, swelteringly hot in the summer and hard to make cozy, but one of them was our home in the mid-1950s at the Kuma Station, Chitose Military Base, Hokkaido, Japan.

After this lesson, you will take out your story along with your goal setting sheet, open your computer and improve your writing.