Schoolhouse Rock Revisited

I will be the first to admit I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole this weekend. After my Friday post, Object versus Subject, I hopped on YouTube to awaen some nostalgic feelings and revisit some of those great Schoolhouse Rock videos (never mind that they are actually more jazz-oriented than rock and roll). Anyway, I think I went through most every one of them - some twice - just reliving the good memories and the absolute brilliance of these three-minute clips as teaching tools. I can't tell you how many times they've rolled through my head at one point or another during my adult life, but I can tell you a built quite an educational foundation upon those little songs. So now I would like to discuss the most important ones again - but as lessons for a writer and not just someone learning grammar. (Don't worry - I will neither sing nor rewrite any lyrics.)

Adverbs: We learned that adverbs are simply modifiers of verbs or sometimes adjectives. However, in writing, there is a lot of controversy about whether they are needed. Some people avoid them entirely because they are too easy to abuse, while others definitely believe they enrich descriptions of action. I make a special note to use my adverbs to offer extra punch, but only when the punch comes from a direction not expected - a sucker-punch, if you will. Like we learned, "quickly" is an adverb we can use to show how someone runs - but that's adverb abuse. If someone runs, we assume it's quickly, so just leave it out. If, however, they run trudgingly, clumsily, or drunkenly, well, those become some high-value adverbs. In short, only modify things where there isn't already an assumption in play.

Adjectives: Now, these are more important parts of description. Do not get them confused with their adverb cousins - use your descriptive words to fill in the blanks of our environment. However, like I mentioned with adverbs, use the descriptors that offer the most bang for their buck. The greenness of a tree, a blue sky, or blue water, these things are givens that really need to pop if you are going to push for describing the water's color. Murky, brackish, crystalline, iridescent with a shimmer of oily residue - now those bring out details that otherwise aren't assumed.

Noun: A noun is a person, place, or thing. Nothing new for writers here - I just needed to replay that song again as I wrote.

Conjunctions: These are toxic little friends of any writer because they attach thoughts and phrases. However, to follow up on the railroad metaphor used in Schoolhouse Rock, if we connect too many ideas and thoughts together it acts like a train with too many connected cars - it drags, weighs down the activity, and ultimately goes nowhere. As writers, we like bringing very complex ideas to life. However, we can get carried away with our ideas and create run-on concepts. In the case of complex sentences, unless you want to go for the compound sentence presentation (to be discussed in the next post), try to limit your sentence length to at best 30-40 words. Long sentences are often more for the author's ego than the presentation of an idea.

For the rest of them, well, go to YouTube and check them out.