Sam's Blog of Learning

The Five Basic Brush Strokes Professional writers have enough experience that they are able to use very complex writing techniques, but that doesn’t mean that students can’t have effective and simple writing techniques of their own. In the article "Painting with Five Basic Brush Strokes” , the author writes about the use of participles, absolutes, appositives, shifting the adjectives out of order, and action verbs. They explain how these writing techniques can be useful for adding details to a sentence, and also how it can make reading more enjoyable. The author shows that without these techniques, writing can be bland. For instance, using the same sentence structure over and over again can be very boring. Using these brushstrokes, I will be able to write in a more pleasant to read fashion. Shifting the order of adjectives in my writing will have the biggest difference, because this is something I don’t do very often. The author’s audience is li

Showing vs. Telling Writers are faced with a choice when they wish to explain something. They can either tell it in straight facts or they can show it by describing how it feels. Telling provides the reader with pure information that they have to process, while showing can appeal to the reader's senses describing how something appeared. Emma Darwin writes about this on her blog . She gives detailed information about how telling or showing their audience something can have very different effects. Darwin also briefly explains how telling or showing can apply a distance between the reader and a character. For example showing can be used to make the reader feel like they are they character, and telling can explain a story in a third person perspective. Darwin’s audience likely consists of students that are learning writing techniques, authors, or possibly teachers. They probably stumbled upon her blog while researching showing and telling. I most like about the article that i