Spell check won't work

Test your spelling by filling in these blanks with the correct word.  Remember that spelling counts!  If you want me to grade your spelling test, put your answers in the comments.

Choose THEIR, THERE, or THEY'RE:

1. He isn't _______________.
2. I'm not _______________ cousin.
3. _______________ are a lot of people who voted for him.
4. _______________ the people who voted for him.
5. _______________ children voted for him.
6. _______________ not very nice.
7. My mother lived _______________ for a while.
8. That's _______________ favorite singer.
9. Is this _______________ son?
10. _______________ right.

Choose YOUR or YOU'RE:

11. You are reading _______________ newspaper
12. Your feet are up because _______________ very tired tonight.
13. _______________ cat is sleeping on the floor next to you.
14. He likes to sleep next to you when _______________ reading the newspaper.
15. Please pick up _______________ baseball equipment.
16. _______________ baseball gear does not belong in the living room!
17. I know that _______________ a very good baseball player.
18. The nurse needs to take _______________ blood pressure.
19. "If _______________ not relaxed, your blood pressure reading will be incorrect, so please relax."
20. "_______________ blood pressure is a little bit high today.  We'll need to monitor it."

Bonus question:  What's wrong with this poster?  (Click to enlarge the poster, if you can't read the small print.)

Rescued puppy

How can people be cruel to animals?  The rescuers emailed the neighborhood:  "My husband and I have rescued a great little puppy, about three weeks ago, who showed up on our back porch. We cannot keep her because we already have two other big dogs."  The vet says she is about 16 weeks old; the rescuers say she is "very sweet, very smart, and very loyal. We have grown very attached to her so we need to find a loving home for her as soon as possible."  I love this picture of her sleeping peacefully, trusting her rescuers.

Books, books ~ and two more books

I came home from teaching today to find a package the mailman had propped carefully beside my door.  In it was a new paperback copy of The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor by Colin Tudge (2009).  Many thanks to Joy Renee of Joystory for the book giveaway.  About this nonfiction book, the publisher says:

"For more than a century, scientists have raced to unravel the human family tree and have grappled with its complications. Now, with an astonishing new discovery, everything we thought we knew about primate origins could change. Lying inside a high-security vault, deep within the heart of one of the world's leading natural history museums, is the scientific find of a lifetime -- a perfectly fossilized early primate, older than the previously most famous primate fossil, Lucy, by forty-four million years."

On my way home I had stopped at the library to run off a few copies.  The book I put on hold last night while typing up the post about Janisse Ray had already arrived at my branch of the library while I slept.  (What I wrote was scheduled to post itself at 3:00 a.m., and it did.)  Here's the book:

Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home by Janisse Ray (2003) is a memoir.

"Seventeen years after she'd left home 'for good,' Janisse Ray pointed her truck away from Montana and back to the small southern town where she was born. Wild Card Quilt is the story ... of the adventures of returning home. For Ray, it is a story of linking the ecology of people with the ecology of place -- of recovering lost traditions as she works to restore the fractured ecosystem of her native South. Her story is filled with syrup boils, quilt making, alligator trapping, and the wonderful characters of a place where generations still succeed each other on the land. But her town is also in need of repair, physical and otherwise. Ray works to save her local school, sets up a writing group at the local hardware store, and struggles with whether she can be an adult in a childhood place."

I'm ready to read about her life's quilt, maybe as I wind down the day before I sleep.

Adding an author to my list

When I wrote about meeting authors, I missed one (maybe more).  Susan Gregg Gilmore's post about visiting Southern bookstores mentioned Janisse Ray, reminding me to go back to my Author Sightings post and add her name.  I met her about a decade ago when she was in Chattanooga for the Conference of Southern Literature.  I had read and loved her book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (1999) about how a childhood spent in rural isolation and steeped in religious fundamentalism grew into a passion to save the almost vanished longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered the South. This book, her first, garnered lots of awards:

Southeastern Booksellers Award 1999
American Book Award 2000
Southern Environmental Law Center 2000 Award for Outstanding Writing
Southern Book Critics Circle Award 2000

Janisse Ray has published three more books since then.  Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home (2003) is about coming home:  "Seventeen years after she'd left home 'for good,' Janisse Ray pointed her truck away from Montana and back to the small southern town where she was born."  Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land (2005) explores southern Georgia's Pinhook Swamp, a vital watershed that links the Okefenokee and the Osceola National Forest.  A House of Branches (2010) is a book of "poems informed by the author's long-standing interest in the wilderness and nature."

I have put Wild Card Quilt on hold at my library.  Have you read any of Janisse Ray's books?

Recent arrivals ~ two old books

My friend Donna is a former English teacher.  When she came to lunch at my house on Monday, she brought two books she thought I might use with my writing classes.

The Write Source by Patrick Sebranek, Dave Kemper, and Verne Meyer (1987) is a handbook for students.  Flipping through it, I quickly saw how outdated some of it is.  For example, there's a handwriting chart inside the back cover; remember our recent discussion of cursive?  (See the comment section of this post.)  Students are no longer being taught cursive writing.

The Write Source also has a section on how to use the card catalog at the library (pp. 190-191).  Okay, raise your hands if you remember the tiny wooden drawers of a card catalog.  It was full of 3x5-sized cards with information about books laboriously typed onto each card (yes, using a typewriter).  I can imagine one of my students saying, "That's a strange way to Google something!"

But some things never change, like "Writing the Paragraph" (p. 95):

Prewriting:  Selecting a Subject
Planning:  Preparing the Subject
Writing:  Writing the First Draft
Revising:  Improving the Writing

The Least You Should Know about English Writing Skills by Teresa Ferster Glazier (1996) is the fifth edition of a book which already has a tenth edition, but the premise intrigues me.  Here it is, from page 2:

"Most English textbooks try to teach you as much as they can.  This one will teach you the least it can -- and still help you learn to write acceptably.  You won't have to bother with predicate nouns and subordinating conjunctions and participial phrases and demonstrative pronouns and all those terms you've been hearing about for years.  You can get along without them if you'll learn thoroughly a few basic rules.  You do have to know how to spell common words; you do have to recognize subjects and verbs to avoid writing fragments and run-together sentences; you do have to know a few rules of punctuation -- but rules will be kept to a minimum."

The first book has lots of drawings by Chris Krenzke, with little characters like the one on the front cover. The pictures make it more visually appealing than the second book, which has a few examples (like underlining subjects and verbs) but no pictures.  I may find more in the second book to use, though, like the list of "words often confused" (pp. 7-10).  Have you noticed people misusing these words?

accept, except
affect, effect
are, or, our ["respect are language by getting it right"]
brake, break
choose, chose
dessert, desert
do, due [and I'll add dew]
feel, fill
have, of [writers use "should of" when thinking "should've"]
hear, here
it's, its [it's contracts "it is," and its shows possession]
knew, new
know, no

About the dessert-desert duo, the author says, "Dessert is the sweet one, the one you like two helpings of.  So give it two helpings of s."



I think I'll make my own list of problem words.  Can you think of others for my list?

A remodel for the books

Imagine buying the house next door, turning the neighboring house into a personal library, and connecting it to your house with an atrium.  What you'd end up with would be something like this:

I learned about this bibliophile's dream over at Book-A-Rama's place.  This screen capture isn't very sharp, but you get the idea.  Click on this Minneapolis StarTribune link to see photos of the two houses before and after they were connected.  (The story was published on August 21.)

Footloose in Chattanooga

Over 140 volunteers exploded into action yesterday to the music of "The Chattanooga Choo Choo" in front of the Tennessee Aquarium.  With just three rehearsals under their belts, dancers delighted Chattanooga's Labor Day weekend tourists and demonstrated once again the vitality of the arts in Chattanooga.