Week 2 Writing Assignment: Playing with Words

Retrieved May 19, 2013

The third writing assignment is about expanding simple sentences by adding logical additional parts of speech (nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases).  Each sentence should be at least twelve words. Elaboration is another skill of creative writing. It adds more details and actions to the the events and helps readers to visualize scenes and see between lines. The beginning can be a simple sentence that consists of a noun and a verb as the example our instructors provided us and we can add a lot to make it talks about itself.

Here are the sentences to choose from:

• The children play.
• The woman walks.
• The sharks swim.
• The flowers bloom.
• The wind blows.
• The computer hums.

Here is the example provided by CEW instructors:

Seals performed

Adding all the parts of speech that we learned during week 2, it can be as follows:

The sleek black seals in the pool leaped eagerly out of the shimmering water, slid quickly upon the wooden deck around the pool, and barked noisily at the stunned spectators in the half-empty bleachers.

Here are my elaborated sentences:

Loud laughter from bottom heart somewhere sent me back to a sweet memory in the far past when suddenly I found them; colored face children crazily play and dance in the chilly lake down the hill.

The blushing red flowers I admire at last bloomed by May 6, gently swayed with the first breezy touch of early morning wind carrying their sweet-smelling fragrance everywhere to happily announce the outset of another lovely spring.

Reflections:

This ability of expanding and elaborating is not an easy skill to learn. I can admit that I have a lot of things to say, but I don’t know how to express them in writing beautifully as the example above. Reading this sentence, I feel all what those seals do, how they do them, what they look like … etc. Playing with words enables us to draw a magnificent painting through which we can express our ideas and feelings more accurately. I lack this ability. Maybe because I don’t have a large vocabulary base. I always use what I know. I think it is time to enlarge and extend my linguistic skills by practicing more and more. I hope to improve them during these writing assignments. I hope so!