Words. Keep looking out for them. Collect them. List them. Value them. Stop worrying about WOW words and find the word that does the job. You know that nouns and verbs work hard for you. You have specialist knowledge -names of things you know well. Use them. So keep on gathering and listing. Don’t just … Continue reading Be specific
When Mole first meets Ratty, in The Wind in the Willows, Ratty takes him out on the river. He stows a picnic hamper in the boat and Mole, curious, asks what’s inside it. Ratty replies, There’s cold chicken inside it … coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfranchrollscressandwichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater – Oh, stop, stop, Mole cries. It is too much. Ratty is worried. ‘Do … Continue reading It’sapicnic!
The Meaning of Liff is a little book put together by John Lloyd and Douglas Adams, who wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It is a collection of definitions that they have made up for place names: Ely (n) The first, tiniest inkling you get that something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong. Seattle(v) To make a … Continue reading The Meaning of Liff
The names of things make for interesting writing. A noun can contain masses of information. A noun conjures up the detail. A noun can take you precisely to the thing it names. A noun often brings with it associations that are yours alone. ‘Westridge Road’ conjures for me a house, a street, a time in … Continue reading Knowing the names
There is no colour palette like nature's colour palette. The colours of nature provide us with the perfect opportunity to fine-tune our observational skills and create our own colour charts. You could explore your local area and make colour charts using photographs or real specimens. What about a colour chart for the school field or … Continue reading Colours of Nature
Many of us walk the same route every day, it might be the walk to school and back, a trip to the corner shop or the regular dog walk. We may not always take the same route, but we may always go to the same place. The Dutch artist, herman de vries walks in a … Continue reading Walk maps
Pleasure in words, a curiosity about them and an awareness, these seem important to us. Paying attention to individual words when we are reading, writing or moving about in the world is an important and interesting part of becoming a writer. Taking care over the words we choose makes a difference to what we say … Continue reading Word sorting
Pat Hutchin’s wonderful book, Rosie’s Walk, contains one sentence. The sentence has two clauses joined by ‘and’, and thirty-two words. One of the joys of the book is the way the pictures tell a part of the story never mentioned in the words. Rosie the hen walks insouciantly around the farmyard followed by a fox, whose … Continue reading A well-crafted sentence
This week we are going to think about language in a more focused way. We continue to read aloud and have children read for themselves. In doing so they acquire the rhythms and turns of phrase, the vocabulary of a favoured author, the desire to try out a new way of writing. It is also … Continue reading Inside the words
Things, everyday things, bring us into a place, a time, even a feeling. Ordinary everyday things can bring a piece of writing alive. That is one reason we often ask you to think of list of objects, names of people and places. What we’d like you to do today is to think of materials -things like … Continue reading Stuff
Writing Box 