“Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
Summertime
– Henry James
“Come with me,” Mom says. “To the library. Books and summertime go together.”
– Lisa Schroeder
“Green was the silence,
wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”
– Pablo Neruda
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“There’s an air of love and of happiness / And this is the Fresh Prince’s new defintion of summer madness.”
– Fresh Prince, Summertime
A great article over at BrainPickings about the importance of routine!
Aristotle would agree: A writing workshop help makes writing a habit.
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
Mark Twain
From St. Nicholas Magazine, August 1916. From the Dave Thomson collection
Aristotle said: “Tragedy is the representation of an action that is complete and whole and of a certain magnitude. A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
Flannery O’Connor said: “In a story something must happen.”
According to these definitions, I think we can call this message, which came today in an email from a student, a story:
Dear Ms. Scribbles, I got a popcorn kernel stuck behind my tonsil. I got it out by having 3 pieces of pizza and 2 pieces of chocolate pie!
Feels complete to me, and I was entertained!
For my seventh graders and Mrs. Moore.
My 9th grade students have introduced me to memes and have written a few of their own based on our reading this semester. This is one of my favorites, written about Penelope, wife of Odysseus in The Odyssey. I rather like Penelope (she’s so much better than that dreadful Helen of Troy) but clearly, some disagree with me.
Okay, so maybe you have to read The Odyssey to get it. Anyway, thanks, Jim!
“From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put.”
– Winston Churchill (or popularly attributed to him)
Winston Churchill was a very witty man, but he was also an effective leader because he had superb communication skills. He even wrote his own speeches.