Inklings

C.S. Lewis is one of my favorite writers. In a biography I was reading lately, it mentions a group of fellow writers and thinkers in England who met regularly at the pub to discuss their writing.
They called themselves the Inklings.

I suggested the name to my little class of homeschooled high school writers who come to my home every Thursday. They latched onto it with alacrity. The two main differences between us and Lewis's cronies? We don't smoke cigars and we don't care about British royalty. (At least I don't.)

I just love the clever triple meaning "inklings."

1) youngins with a shared penchant for pens
2) followers of Mother Ink (me)
3) ponderings, thoughts, feelings, hunches

I love my Inklings, Maggie and Becca. They are eager to be better writers. They welcome constructive criticism (and don't cry at the sight of ink spilled like blood on the page). They are insightful, opinionated, funny, and diligent. A teacher's dream class, I'd say. I love that I can give them six or ten things to work on in one week. This week, for example:

-Avoid cliches.
-Eliminate run-on sentences. Separate complete but similar thoughts with punctuation; that's why it was invented.
-Omit "very" before adjectives (lazy; use strong adj instead).
-Organize your writing before you start. Good writing follows good thinking.
-Don't use "this" as an pronoun. (This is bad.) Make "this" an adjective: This habit is better than that.
- Be concise.
-Vary sentence structure. Don't always start with a prep phrase, a subject, or a gerund.
- Use special punctuation sparingly. Most sentences need only a period. Exclamation points are overused and therefore lack emphasis. It's okay to say, "Fire!" but not, "The building was on fire!"
-Avoid "there are." Take a look at the words following "there are" and see if you can start the sentence with one of them.
-Use active voice (the boy wiped his butt) instead of the passive voice (the butt was wiped by the boy). We all like boys to wipe their own butts, especially when they start school, but I've already mentioned that in an earlier post, and am therefore committing the cardinal sin of writing which is wordiness that we all want to avoid like the plague at all costs because it makes the reader pant with breathless anticipation for an end mark such as a period, question mark, or exclamation point!!!!!!!!!!!