Things I Learned About Craft

15 Things I Learned About Craft In This Course:

1. There is a proper way to incorporate absolutes in a piece in order to support
your opinion.
2. Lyrical pieces evoke emotion in a different way than prose pieces do.
3. Creating a pattern based on the number of words in each sentence can make
a piece read faster or slower, depending on the word count.
4. Inserting poetry into a prose piece can bring clarity about the authors true
feelings about the subject they are writing about.
5. Blank space is not always wasted space.
6. Using words like beautiful, happy, and stuff can detract from the
message of the piece, making it seem mundane and too simple.
7. Shorter sentences provoke more thought, leaving it up to the reader to more
deeply analyze the words.
8. Transitions arent absolutely necessary.
9. Choppy, incongruent sentences are acceptable when the overarching theme
of the piece clearly and effortlessly connects the sentences on its own.
10. Choppiness enables sentences to build on each other, creating cumulative
emotional responses.
11. Images in prose and lyrical pieces do not detract from the text, but enhance
it.
12. Assigning deeper, more meaningful definitions to mundane words makes the
words more relatable to the reader, enabling them to deeply feel the emotion
of the piece.
13. Juxtaposing the humorous with the dark creates a more realistic depiction of
emotion, making the piece humanistic and cohesive.
14. Using events that actually happened as part of contextual evidence for feeling
a certain way can give the audience the understanding needed to relate to the
emotions in a piece.
15. Nonfiction pieces are not solely based on facts or unbiased information.
Often times nonfiction pieces are relatable and biased in favor of the writer,
because it is their nonfiction.