Witty Wendsday

Have you noticed teacher's propensity to assign vocab stories? Did you notice how I used the word propensity in a sentence? Here's 2 of my vocab assignments, one from this year, one from tenth grade. You can see how I have fun with these - enjoy!

English 10 GT
November 27, 2007
A Succinct Statement
Some students do not enjoy writing short stories, which lack rhetoric (Adjective Clause), because when they do all creativity seems to be defunct. There are many dogmatic opinions on this point. Writing short stories (Gerund Phrase) is an abstract assignment that does not requires students to be adroit, and instead forces their originality to be pliable and dictated. Assigning students to write (infinitive phrase) a short story is a cryptic way of telling them that their teacher is bored. Since Mrs. Lawrence, an idyllic English teacher, (Absolute Phrase) has not yet seemed to be bored with her classes, (Adverb Clause) her assigning short stories is ostensibly seen as a peccadillo for which she will not be held accountable. It can be emphatically assured that her logistics for future lessons will circumspect any more short stories, especially since that could cause a pandemic of choleric students rioting against being forced to write baubles of fiction instead of good, factual essays. (Adverb clause) It is expected that palpable results of change will be shown in order to wipe out all memory of this mistake.

Although some students may be against short stories, the philippic statement above is not what I think about writing short stories. I’m actually ebullient about them. I enjoy trying to fit all the vocabulary words into a humorous hodgepodge of sentences!


English 12 AP
Vocab unit 3 - December 2009
Writer’s Block
“This is the story about a girl who…,” I stared at the page blankly. There was a plethora of words to choose from, but an annoying lack of creative topics in my head. The persiflage of my classmates buzzed around my head as I looked at the vocabulary. I knew we were going to be asked to write a story, and generally creative writing was one of my fortes, but I could not write a whole story in just one page. A story needed to have a beginning, middle, and an end, but there was more to well written fiction than only these pragmatic concerns. Good fiction needed plot, character development, dialogue! These factors were not simply ancillary, they were vital to good stories!
As I scribbled down these frustrated thoughts, other students looked at me quizzically. They didn’t recognize that writing, for me, has many therapeutic benefits. I erased the beginning of my story from the top of my page and began again. “This is the tale of Marvin the mountebank, a man who liked to cozen children and rodents with his pipe.” “Well”, I thought, “at least I have a beginning. However, it sounds unusually like The Pied Piper of Hamlin.” Frustrated again, I erased my second attempt.
Resting my chin in my hands, I stared off into the distance as I began to imagine a religious icon who would cause a schism by creating paeans about himself and calling it the Word of God. Now there was a story you could really enjoy. But unfortunately I had run out of time – the bell was ringing and my page was only filled with the restless scribbling of my random mind. Then, when I looked more closely, I realized that I had used several vocabulary words. Quickly, I highlighted them in pink and scrawled my name and a title at the top. “It may not be a story”, I thought, “but at least it is interesting!” That, my friend, is the story of the term, “writer’s block”.