Incomplete option for your story

Dear Writers,

Let me hear from you by email. How is your project going? Your lives are upended as that of your teachers.

I imagine many of you need more time to write the narrative. That can be done because of the pandemic, and you can agree with me to take and I for incomplete.

This is a good option.  You’ll have to sign an agreement for a final due date. I’m recommending a mid August deadline because that way you won’t have it hanging over you when you are taking fall classes (I hope). You can take the summer to finish the story and I can coach you by email and with telephone interviews. 

Let me know. The address is Michael.Berryhill@tsu.edu

Important notice about registration and pass/fail grade option.

Dear Writers,

Please check your TSU email at least daily to keep up with university information.

Here is the latest that came this afternoon.

MB

In order to make software modifications, online registration for the May mini-mester, Summer and Fall classes will be temporarily suspended beginning Friday, April 24, at 10 p.m. through the end of day on Thursday, April 30. Additionally, Clearinghouse transcript availability will be temporarily suspended during this period. Registration will resume on Friday, May 1.

Also, please don’t forget that the deadline to select the Pass/No Pass grading option for any of your Spring 2020 classes is Thursday, April 30, at 11:59 p.m. (Step-by-step instructions attached.) April 30 is also the deadline to drop any Spring 2020 classes.

TSU Grade Change via SSB_Student_v1

Narratively website

Here’s an interesting website full of stories by young writers. I subscribe to their newsletter, and you might consider that. Reading is essential for anyone who wants to be in story-telling business. The people who make movies are always reading, looking for a story that could be adapted. And by the way, many of the most successful movies are adopted from short stories, not novels, which are often too complex and long for adaptation. But a short story seems to be the perfect mix for a movie: sharply focused on a few characters with a direct chain of action and reaction. Check it out.

https://narratively.com/

Pass/fail grading and how to do it

Dear Writers,

I’m attaching a four-page set of instructions on how to select the pass/fail grading option. It seems a bit complicated. But here it is. Please send me an email soon. 

This is a difficult time. I’m sure you all have had complications and I want you to know I will work with you on accommodations.

MB

TSU Grade Change via SSB_Student_v1

Writer’s Almanac

For a long time I’ve subscribed to Writer’s Almanac, which delivers a poem and several brief biographies of writers. It’s done by Garrison Keillor, the Minnesota radio guy and sometimes New Yorker writer. See for example what he and his staff wrote about the writer Francine Prose. (Great name for a novelist.)

Today is the birthday of American novelist Francine Prose (books by this author), born in Brooklyn (1947). Prose is best known for her novels Household Saints (1981), about an Italian butcher and his schizophrenic daughter, and Blue Angel (2000), a witty and dark satire on academia and writing workshops.

Prose graduated from Radcliffe College (1968), but dropped out of graduate school after reading Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which inspired her to write in earnest. Her first novel, Judah the Pious, was published in 1973, and she’s gone on to write over 30 books of fiction and nonfiction, including two young adult books, Touch (2009) and The Turning (2012). Prose is a frequent reviewer of books for New York Review of Books and teaches at Bard College. She wrote a best-selling book on the craft of writing, Reading Like a Writer (2006), in which she advises would-be writers to read widely. She said, “The advantage of reading widely, as opposed to trying to formulate a series of general rules, is that we learn there are no general rules, only individual examples to help point you in a direction in which you might want to go.”