LTW Journal 10/9

(Part of an ongoing series detailing our Lost Tools of Writing adventures.  Previous posts here.)

We are finishing Lesson 2 Elocution.

FYI:  The program is organized into three-week, three part lessons.  Each week we focus on a different canon, or "body of rules".  (LTW is based on the first three of the five canons of classical rhetoric:  Invention, Arrangement and Elocution.)  We whizzed through the first lesson, but the second one took longer than three weeks!  As long as we learn the material, I am okay with that.  But back to my subject.

One of the friendly people on the LTWMentors yahoo group helped me quite a bit by pointing out that I was making grammatical parallelism more complicated than it needs to be at this stage.  I needed to hear that.  I tend toward an inflexible attitude when teaching a new format, and run the risk of exasperating my children with too much detail work.

So.  The nouns do not have to be the same exact word.  They just have to be nouns.  Yay.  Sometimes things really are as simple as they look.

What follows are the first paragraphs of the girls' introductory persuasive essays.  I hesitated to post these, as they are political in nature.  Therefore, I might get unnecessary political traffic on my educational blog.  So if you are reading this post to find out more on Rick Perry or the TSA, please understand that we are doing a junior high/high school academic writing exercise.  We are not looking to debate these issues.  Yet.  Let us master our rhetoric skills first.  :)

(I wanted to use the Boromir/Frodo practice essay, but we did a lot of new work on it last week and I cannot find my notes.  Phrasing the proofs in different ways taught us more perfectly what we were trying to prove, so we decided to alter the proofs.  I'll post all that later if/when I find it.  :disorganized:)

They both ended up with subject, verb, direct object as their grammar in parallel.  (We found it much easier to rearrange words if we first analyzed the proof sentences a la Winston Grammar.)  These paragraphs are very simplistic, so remember (with me) that our efforts will get more refined over time.  Right now we are learning the form.

Aravis, age 17

The TSA should not be able to pat us down or put us through full-body scanners for three reasons. The TSA searches invade privacy, violate the law and do not catch terrorists.

Mariel, age 14

Rick Perry should be President of the United States of America for three reasons. He is a Republican, he shows leadership qualities, and he gets great results.

 

(For the record, her father and I are leaning more toward Herman Cain.  Again, not looking for a debate on the subject.  If you want to debate my husband, you can do so on FB.)