Book-in-a-Box
TashaDavis
In my Language Arts class, we have recently been learning about fictional and apocalyptic writing. The reason we have been learning this is because of a new project that we created called the Book-in-a-Box project. In this project we created our own short apocalyptic fiction stories in groups. Before we were even given our groups, we were creating a dossier for our major characters, and writing vignettes to help us understand them better. A dossier is a collection of papers giving detailed information about a particular person or subject. In this case, I created a dossier for a fictional character to develop their backstory. A vignette is a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives an impression about a character, idea, setting, or object. These vignettes tell a story by themselves or individually. We were using these vignettes to help us understand how our characters acted, and how we could write them better in the actual short story.
Most of what I learned was to prepare me for writing the short story, so it makes sense that I have grown most in the knowledge of how to place punctuation in my works. Before this project, I did not know anything about how to use punctuation in dialogue. In several of my old stories, it is very evident that I didn’t know anything about it. Especially when it came to commas.
One thing that has really improved my punctuation, is that my teacher gave us a worksheet to teach us how to do it. Unlike in all of my other classroom experiences where the teachers would just give you back something that told you where to fix things, my language arts teacher actually told the class how not to mess up in the first place. The Comma Usage Worksheet really helped me to see how punctuation should be used and how it was important to the actually reading experience.
Something that really helped was to show us several examples of how dialogue should be punctuated. We were given a nearly unpunctuated story called “The Lottery,” and we had to properly punctuate the story with quotation marks, and it provided a lot of insight as to how quotation marks were actually used when it came to writing.
The artifacts that I will use this year are before and after shots if you will, and prove that I have learned how to properly punctuate my writing. I will compare a short story that I made for my main character’s dossier, with a work that I wrote for my team’s short story after I learned how to properly punctuate sentences and dialogue.
The before example is titled “Who’s up for Tag?” and was written before my class learned how to properly use commas and quotation marks. This was a vignette that I wrote for my Major Character’s dossier to help develop the relationship that she has with a boy in the story, and make sure that people know, it’s strictly platonic. There were quite a few places in it where, when I used quotation marks, I put the comma outside of the quotations and also a place where I had a period outside of the quotations too.
Another artifact that I have, is a short vignette that I put into the first short story. This was something that I wrote after my group had started working on the short story. We were given instructions to overly develop the place where our major character came into the story. This was supposed to give the characters a chance to become more rounded. Round characters are far more interesting than flat characters because they encounter conflict and are changed by it. This way our characters would be more true to character. This vignette shows my work after I learned how to properly place my quotations. For the first time since my last second grade quiz on the subject, all of my punctuation was in its correct place.
One obstacle that I had to overcome was my bad memory. I knew previously that a comma went either before or after the quotation marks. If it went before, did it have a space right after it?
In the future and throughout my time at school, this new ability will allow my work to look neat and professional.