1B
1. Five-minute freewrite.
2. Dialogue rules. Students brainstormed what they knew about dialogue punctuation. They got a demo from Ms. Garvoille using her amazing dialogue cards. Here’s a good overview of the rules: http://theeditorsblog.net/2010/12/08/punctuation-in-dialogue/ Think you got it down? Test yo’self here!
3. Dialogue eavesdropping. At the end of class, we watched five minutes of the fifteen-minute film The Intimacy of Strangers by Eva Weber, featured at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Watch some of it by clicking here! As we watched, we tried to write down as many fragments of conversation as we could hear. This exercise will help us write more realistic dialogue in our memoirs. We realized that many people repeat words, interrupt themselves, and use slang.
4. Dialogue practice. Now that we knew what kind of dialogue we might be working with, we started to apply the punctuation rules. Students challenged themselves by punctuating the following:
HW: Write a scene that may (meaning it doesn’t have to) appear in your memoir that includes both dialogue and description. 1 page minimum. Due Friday.
2AB
1. Freewrite.
2. JoAnn Beard’s “Behind the Screen.” We read together a short memoir (or really an “autobiographical short story”) by the wonderful author JoAnn Beard (who I met this summer!). You can read the first page of it here. As we read, we stopped to discuss the writer’s choices, the effect of dialogue on the story, and the significance of the title. This served as a model for students’ own memoirs.
HW: Write a scene that may (meaning it doesn’t have to) appear in your memoir that includes both dialogue and description. 1 page minimum. Due Thursday.
4B
1. Freewrite.
2. Characterization share. Students shared the best line or lines of their characterization homework with two other people in class; the two people then tried to guess the author’s attitude toward the character they were describing.
3. Dialogue rules. Students brainstormed what they knew about dialogue punctuation. They got a demo from Ms. Garvoille using her amazing dialogue cards. Here’s a good overview of the rules: http://theeditorsblog.net/2010/12/08/punctuation-in-dialogue/ Think you got it down? Test yo’self here!
4. Dialogue eavesdropping. We watched five minutes of the fifteen-minute film The Intimacy of Strangers by Eva Weber, featured at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Watch some of it by clicking here! As we watched, we tried to write down as many fragments of conversation as we could hear. This exercise will help us write more realistic dialogue in our memoirs. We realized that many people repeat words, interrupt themselves, and use slang.
5. Dialogue practice. Now that we knew what kind of dialogue we might be working with, we started to apply the punctuation rules. Students challenged themselves by punctuating the following:
6. JoAnn Beard’s “Behind the Screen.” We read together a short memoir (or really an “autobiographical short story”) by the wonderful author JoAnn Beard (who I met this summer!). You can read the first page of it here. As we read, we stopped to discuss the writer’s choices, the effect of dialogue on the story, and the significance of the title. This served as a model for students’ own memoirs.
HW: Write a scene that may (meaning it doesn’t have to) appear in your memoir that includes both dialogue and description. 1 page minimum. Due Friday.
On Friday we will work in groups to workshop either the setting, character description, or dialogue piece.
ALEXA GARVOILLE 