Mythical Class

I read through Chapter 2: Telling a Story  of the EmpoWord manual. ( link ) Internal Monologue, Surely. ( Link ) Once I figured out how to navigate the e-book, it was an interesting read. At times the material seemed a little early, but exploring the basics is always productive because there is always something that you can learn. I did not do the table and graph activities, but I still picked up some useful information from their organization. I think some of the best exercises to improve writing include timed (or untimed) freewriting. If the activity is not timed, it is helpful to still hold yourself accountable to write for the whole period. When you take a step back and focus less on getting every word perfect, a lot more gets completed as a whole. I often have to remind myself that I should finish a draft of something before the editing phase. Getting caught up in changes before something is fleshed out is asking for trouble- both big and small picture. I wi...

The Fables of Aesop  by Joseph Jacobs Reading link  Aesop's Animals. From wiki commons.   This was such a pleasant exploration of characters and stories. I was shocked at how short a story could be the still portrayed a narrative so clearly and with so much depth. There were two versions of The Fox and the Crane ( direct link)  where they told the same fables but in even less words. The first was already short, maybe a paragraph and a half, but the second reduced the same story down to a five-line limerick. It would be interesting to explore writing two versions of one story with varied lengths.  This could be helpful to explore how concise I want my texts to be. Also, a side note: this reading included a version of the saying "love can tame the wildest." In this fable, it set this up to portray the misleading or judgment-clouding attribute of infatuation. I had always interpreted the saying as one that spoke to the (beneficial) strength of the feeling....