Category: Blog

by: Brianna Barron-Moreno

Proofreading is the uttermost important technique in order to produce great writing, this is the final step that a writer should always check through in order to make sure that their final piece doesn’t have any errors or mistakes; such as having spelling errors, poor paragraphs and sentence structure, and bad grammar. Rephrasing sentences that don’t flow in with one another, adding details, removing unnecessary information, adding commas, and correcting the tense are a few things that I’ll be explaining throughout my given examples and reasonings.

When going back to look at your final product keep in mind to always read your work double in order to find those small spelling errors or bad grammar that you might’ve missed the first time reading it. Here’s an example that shows some errors that people might’ve missed at first and went back to proofread:

As you can tell, in red, they took out some words that sounded repetitive or didn’t sound right while reading. This can be seen in the sentence “to which economics can be applied and be used to understand” instead of having “be applied and be used” just take out the unnecessary words and focus on the conjunction “and” instead. With that, you don’t need the extra “be”. The sentence would sound smoother as “be applied and used…”

Then, they would fix their bad grammar by inserting commas into some sentences to separate a series of words and avoid confusion. This can be seen in the sentence “to my surprise the daily news which I used to watch was now not just a means of watching new people debate but also a learning experience, I was able to…” At first this sentence sounds too long and just seems like it’s a run off sentence, not having any pauses, which could confuse the reader. Instead, adding commas in the appropriate areas can create a smoother and more direct sentence.

After you’ve made sure to look and fix your small errors, start to look at the bigger picture which sentences need arrangement, removement, and added details.  

Take the same paragraph, but this time look at the red words, observe how many of these sentences and words have been corrected, removed, or even rearranged in order to make the sentence structure sound smoothly while reading. Take the sentence “in 11th standard I along with some of my friends and my economics teacher, created a WPI index, by taking average prices of a basket of commodities from different wholesale markets to measure inflation.” Here they’ve corrected the tense, added details, rearranged the sentence, and replaced a word with a more relevant one, building the paragraph’s structure into a smoother, nicer flow.

In conclusion, proofreading is a technique that produces great writing, it helps improve your final product by giving it a nice written content flow that helps address the correct message towards your audience. When you’re done with your writing make sure to always read your work double this can help you pin point some spelling errors, bad grammar, words that don’t sound good or are repetitive, and even sentences that don’t flow in with one another and may need to be rephrased.

By Cassandra Carmichael

Blank pages can be scary. Sometimes it’s hard to pull an idea out of nowhere. We all need a little inspiration to get the gears moving. Try out these 5 tips for filling a blank page! If you like these tips or want to learn more on how to expand your writing techniques, consider taking Dr. Ford’s Creative Writing course here at our campus. You’ll learn more techniques like these and so much more!

1. Start with a name

Names have a lot of power. The meanings of a name or even the sound can start a whole train of thought. Starting with a name can help you build a character and a story around this name. Picking a name from a baby book or generator can spark some ideas. Say you randomly pick the name Dahlia. Maybe Dahlia is a small ginger girl with bright blue eyes. Maybe Dahlia is a very innocent and kind girl but lives in a big, dirty city with many mean and two-faced people. A flower in a field of weeds. Have fun with the meaning of your name and twist that story around it. Maybe your character has a pet dog they rely on for comfort and safety. This dog could be named Apollo, referring to the god of healing. Names can be a good start to a short story. 

2. A Memory 

Every story has a little bit of truth and a little bit of a lie. Try starting out with the truth. Think of a memory that either happened to you or someone you know or even on the news. Once you have that memory find the part you can exaggerate or change into something completely different to take the story on a different path. Change names or settings or dialogue and see where this new memory will take you. Say you had a memory about going on a boat trip with your dad. Nothing that exciting happened, but you can make it exciting. In the middle of the night, while the boat rocked under the moonlight, a mermaid came up to the side of the boat. You talked to the mermaid and decided to trade places for the night. With her magic, you become a mermaid and she becomes human. It didn’t really happen, but it started with the memory of your boat trip with dad.  

3. Your Dreams 

As college students, sleep isn’t that high on our things-to-do list, but everyone dreams sometimes. Dreams can be the perfect starter to a story. They can be completely wacky or tell us a lot about our inner selves. Maybe you had a dream about a gorilla sitting on your living room couch. You could write about how earlier, you had visited the zoo and secretly fed the gorilla your mom’s gross tuna sandwich. The gorilla loved it so much that he snuck into the back of your dad’s van and came home with you. The weirder the dream, the better the story.

4. A Picture

Any kind of visual can help you stir up a story whether it’s a painting, photograph, sculpture, or any form of art. Maybe a scenery or unique architecture can tickle an idea. Let’s say you see a picture of a cemetery flooded by water from some sort of storm. The coffins are pulled up from the ground and floating all around the field bumping into each other. From this visual build a story around it. Write about how everyone in Heaven was freaking out because their clothes are all wet and they don’t know why. Maybe a spirit from Heaven volunteers to investigate and travels down to Earth. After discovering what had happened to their poor graveyard, this spirit must find someone to restore the cemetery! But who will listen to a ghost? Anything that catches your eye is a great prompt starter. 

5. Trade Shoes 

If you’re an adult male and always write from the point of view of an adult male you are limiting your creativity. This might sound odd but think about your own writing and what you tend to lean towards. Most likely your own gender and age because that’s what you know the best. You know what a person your age does and doesn’t do. You know the advantages and disadvantages of your gender. But try trading shoes with someone else and see what new pathways you can take. This also leads you to research and exploring new ideas. Try branching out into new viewpoints to see what possibilities you can take. 

By Kassidy Boles

Writing poetry doesn’t have to be hard… but it is, isn’t it? The words don’t always flow, and we find ourselves unable to convey the emotion that poetry should so powerfully emphasis. What poetry comes down to is its structure, use of language, and whether or not to rhyme. To write from the heart can get lost in translation and my goal here is to help you, dear reader and perspective writer, understand why your poetry might be feeling a little… flat.

So, you’ve got your poem written out, but is it conveying what you want it to? Well, take a look at the poem’s structure. Is it consistent? This is important as a poem that is all over the place can lose a reader quickly and a poem without structure is just a blurb on the page. If you are writing poetry about a happy topic, long drawn out, deep lines will cut the reader to the core instead of uplifting them. It’s important to play around with your poem after you’ve gotten ink on the page so to speak. Here is where you as the author can experiment on your creation such as a mad scientist, crazed and needing that creative fix only you can create. You have the time now to play with your pace and diction, what concept you wish to emphasize.

But what is the language like in your poem? Are you using flowery words and telling someone how they should feel, or are you creating an image within the mind’s eye? Concrete language can make or break a poem. Avoiding abstract words and conveying meaning using literal terms will emphasize your poem in every way you want it to. Instead of saying, “She was happy,” try, “She shone from ear to ear brighter than the sun.” Words that are literal are vivid as they can be seen, felt, touched, or heard. You can use literal terms such as night, weeping, frigid, to convey mystery and unease while words like, cinnamon, violet, coffee, or tea could be worked together to talk about someone special. Even sensations can be produced through your poetry such as “hot like a summer day, the cacophonous roar of a hurricane, the smell of fresh baked apple pie,” are all examples of things someone can sense in a veritable way. Though poetry is to be interpreted by the reader, you don’t want your reader to get lost in those interpretations. The last thing you want is for the poem to be too vague. Specific details paint a picture and that’s what makes poetry so desirable. Comparisons will be your friend, events are relatable, objects are tangible. Never tell the reader how to feel, instead show them what it means to feel.

But what about rhyming? It’s easy to feel like a poem should rhyme as we are hit with it all the time in the media. We’ve all heard nursery rhymes and the whimsical tone they have. But poetry is not limited to such things and really, rhyming your poem can distract your reader from the poem itself. Make no mistake, to have a rhythm in your poetry and to rhyme are very different things. Take great caution as rhyming tends to feel forced if not used properly and the poem itself loses the momentum as you spend your time searching for the word that fits, instead of the right word. Instead of forcing your poem to rhyme, focus instead on how you want it to sound when spoken aloud. Practicing around friends and family will help with perfecting the sound of your poem. Focus on your syllables and which words will be stressed. Action words like nouns and verbs will have the stressed sound you’ll be looking for, while shorter words such as “a, I, the” will flow in between. Meter is used to refer to the sound pattern of a poem, it’s stressed and unstressed beat, and will give your poem the rhythm without the rhyme.

By: Katlyn Kaminskie

In this post I will talk about a few reasons why submitting your work to a magazine or just in general submitting your work is a really good idea for any aspiring artist.

1. Submitting your work to a literary magazine or submitting your work anywhere for that matter is good exposure for an aspiring artist or writer. Even if its just a small magazine, your work will still be out there in the public eye and you never know who will see it.
2. Submitting your work to possibly get published will most definitely improve your work. Whether the piece is accepted to the be published or not it will make you look at what you are creating differently, once it is published with your name attached people will begin to associate you with what you created. Sometimes when you submit your work places you will also receive feedback on what to improve which greatly helps you as well. A good example of this is when you write an article for a website, once you submit it you receive feedback on whether or not the topic is appropriate and how you can make the article better but if it never was submitted your ideas would never be shared and you would not how to convey them in a better way.
3. Whether what you have created is published in a magazine or not it is good experience for you the creator. How is your work not being published good experience you may wonder, well like I said before it helps you improve your work in a multitude of ways. Also, I personally feel that submitting your work helps improve your confidence which is key in any situation, and submitting your work means you were confident enough to let a stranger read it which is very important in this type of field, which leads me to my next reason.
4. Be proud of the work you create! It is something you thought of on your own and took the time to create, no matter what anyone says you put time and effort into the piece, and you should most definitely be proud of it. If you are proud of it then there is no harm in others reading or looking at it. You love and are most likely very passionate about this skill you have so own it!
5. We want to see, read, or listen to what you have created! Like I said before be proud of what you have made, while it may not always feel like it others do enjoy what you have created especially a literary and arts magazine like Elektraphrog! The more submissions we receive the better and we would love to help you!

First off, let’s note that performing poetry is not for everyone. Sometimes a poet’s heart is simply in the written work, or the idea of the stage is too daunting to attempt. Other times a poet desires to incorporate another facet of poetry into their work such as performing it.

When it comes to reading poetry in front of an audience it is very different than other types of public speaking or theater. It can be a truly rewarding experience to share your thoughts and emotions with an audience.

So let’s talk about 10 helpful tips to performance poetry and how to better enrich your experience as a performance poet.

These tips can provide you with a framework to spoken word poetry as well as encouragement to be creative!

Every writer has a voice and spoken word poetry is another way to use yours. Let’s get started!

1. Speak up! It’s important to note that any piece you read in front of an audience you have selected for people to hear…so make sure they hear it!

2. Don’t hide behind your paper or microphone. At most places where you will be performing your work, there is a microphone. Try not to hide behind it or behind your paper. It is okay to walk around the area with the microphone in one hand or lean away from the microphone to emphasize a word. Don’t think you are confined to the small square right behind the microphone.

3. Find a friendly face. Nerves are inevitable but one thing that can alleviate some of the nervous feeling is finding a friendly face in the audience. A friend, a family member, or even a teacher could be a perfect face to look to during the beginning of your poem to make you comfortable.

4. Don’t oversell it. Try to avoid being extravagantly animated or over the top in your performance. Don’t try to force the audience to be entertained. Try to keep it natural and comfortable for both you and the audience.

5. Use a piece you like. When deciding on what to perform, pick a piece you enjoy reading. Pick a piece you are familiar with and have completed. Pick a piece you are confident in and proud to share.

6. Don’t think of it as a formal speech. You don’t have to treat it as a formal speech. You can dress casually and treat it more like a party with friends. Think of it as a comfortable atmosphere.

7. Know your audience. If you are in a pub with fellow adults your age, you might read a poem about your last heartbreak and use some unapologetic words to describe that partner, but, if you are in a coffee shop that may have children around, it’s probably best to avoid such things as profanity. This is when it’s important to know your audience. Be respectful to who may be listening to your poem and make sure that your topic fits the event.

8. Don’t edit as you perform. It is not required to have your poem memorized to perform it; it is actually more likely that you will have it printed out on paper. If so, try to refrain from editing your work as you read it. If there is a word misspelled try not to tell the audience there’s a typo. If you don’t like a line as you are reading it, don’t stop in the middle to correct yourself. Make sure your work is as completed as possible before you perform it so you won’t be tempted to edit it.

9. Focus on delivery; make the audience see the words. Since performance poetry is something that the audience listens to instead of reads, make sure the audience can experience what you’re saying. You’re telling them the story behind your poetry. Use different and interesting speaking tactics to make it entertaining and keep their attention. For example use articulation, inflections, tone, facial expressions, and hand motions.

10. Don’t forget to practice. Practice helps you to know what you are saying so that you don’t trip over your words. Practice helps you to feel confident in your work and to own it. Practice makes perfect!

Best wishes,

Amanda Finsel

by Patrick Chiodo

Every writer out there knows what it is like to have writer’s block or struggle to find enough words to meet the word requirement. Writers who reread their work to proofread might realize that their work might be a bit too boring for some, or some readers might just lose interest halfway into their work. You can’t inform the readers of what you want to inform them if your work is too boring for them to continue. That’s why I have given a few ways to help a troubled writer be able to make their piece a work of art. Using these tips are guaranteed to help enhance your work.

1.Improv on paper.

Sometimes your best ideas or lines can come from the top of your mind. Brainstorming and planning are, of course, essential in writing good works, but using a reaction that you get that just hits you when writing can be a blessing.

2. Consider your target audience.

If the piece is for kids, maybe steer clear of big words. If the work is a formal piece, use a copious amount of diction, but don’t use too much or some might just think that you are showing off your wordplay.

3. Add humor when appropriate.

Everyone loves humor, so if it fits in naturally, use it. I have always found that if you open, say, the next topic in an essay with a joke that relates to the topic, then people will enjoy the work more often than opening with a run-of-the-mill fact.

4. Make sure your grammar and punctuation are correct.

If your work has mistakes in the grammar, the reader will believe that the work that they are reading was not done by a professional.

5. If writing dialogue, repeat it to yourself to make sure it sounds natural.

The way we write isn’t always the way we speak. This goes both ways. If you are writing a character’s dialogue, but you don’t want them to speak like other’s in your story, then you should establish the character’s backstory. Say the character is from the deep South, then when they are speaking, they should be saying “Ain’t” or Y’all” instead of “Isn’t” or “Everyone”.

The Short Story

Miranda Olsen

Most people have probably read a short story in their lifetime. Whether it was for school, in a book, or possibly even a magazine, the idea of writing a short story, which some see as a “mini-novel”, can appear daunting and difficult, the reality is-it’s easy as pie. Here are five easy tips to help you get started.

#1 Start With A Bang. Have your story start in the middle of a chase, during a storm, during a verbal or physical fight. This is called a “hook.” Having such a scene will literally hook your reader in. If you start with a hook, it will draw your reader in and make them more inclined to read more and find out what happens. Use good imagery and detail to make it feel real. Example: “Jack kept restarting his boat engine, occasionally looking up at the storm clouds above him. Lightning and thunder were inching closer to him. The waves began to grow. Jack was with his sister Sarah, who looked just as afraid as he did. They were only sixteen years old, and immediately regretted stealing the boat. What was supposed to be a nice day on the water had suddenly turned into a nightmare. Lightning began to strike closer now. The oars in the boat were old and rotten, yet Jack tried his best to use them. He used all his might to propel the boat forward but the growing waves would not allow it. The seas were angry. Jack did not know why. Worst of all, he did not know how to soothe them. The boat was beginning to tip and the two children looked to each other for guidance, but found only fear and confusion. A large swell washed over the boat, soaking them both to the bone.”

#2 Don’t Forget Dialogue. For a short story to be fast paced, exciting, and well flushed out, it needs dialogue. What is dialogue? It’s speech between characters. Dialogue can easily become too fake sounding or too boring. To better help write dialogue that mimics real speech, eavesdrop on some conversations. What do the people say? Do they use slang? Here’s an example of simple dialogue:

Jack looked at Sarah and sighed.

“The engine isn’t working,” Jack said.

“Well. fix it!” She replied.

“I can’t! It’s broken!”

“I don’t want to die out here,” Sarah said, sobbing.

#3 Keep It Short. The shorter your story, the more punch it will pack. Keep your writing under 5,000. Anything more than that is sort of rambling on. Keep your story fast paced and exciting, and you can’t really do that if your story is going over 5,000 words. Despite it’s short length, it needs to have certain elements that make it work. Have a hook to draw your reader in, have rising action to build to a climax, have falling action to lead to a resolution, and have a good ending. Try not to kill off your characters if you can help it, but feel free to end with a plot twist or some sort of mystery.

#4 Give Your Characters Some Backstory. What do your characters look like? Does Jack have a small build, or a big build? Hair and eye color? Is Sarah beautiful or plain? Do your characters have any distinguishable features like scars or moles? Flush out your characters and give them a good backstory. What is their home life like? Why are they the way that they are? Keep your cast of characters small, two to three should keep the story on track. Jack and Sarah are stuck out at sea, which makes a great scenario. A man and a woman. “Adam and Eve.” It’s a great scenario for you, as an author, to flush out those two characters. Use dialogue to increase or decrease tension, maybe throw in some romance? Two people, especially a man and a woman make for a great short story.

#5 Practice, Practice, Practice. Your first draft is not going to be perfect. It will have flaws-but that’s okay. Go back and read it out loud. Does the dialogue sound natural? Is the story fast paced enough? Is the story too plain, or too complicated? Does it sound like a real situation or is it meant to be far fetched? Your story won’t be final until your second or third draft. And if you don’t like it after all that work-write a new one! Write different stories about different topics. Have fun and be bold. The possibilities with writing are endless, that’s the magic of it. With pen and paper or a laptop or tablet, you can create new worlds, new characters, and new legends. But if you want to write a story that really moves someone, that’s interesting and fresh, that’s easy to understand yet complex , you need to practice, practice, practice!