Take Heed, Scribes!

Listen babies, Irish opens in just 37 days. At that festival, some talented people will win prizes in our baking, photography, knitting and writing contests. The thing is, entries for the writing contest, unlike the other three, are due BEFORE Irish Fest opens. On August 22nd which is only 30 days off. I don't know about you but I can take that long to compose a grocery list. So I hope you've begun your epic.

As you work, you may find that the important lessons in English grammar and usage you learned in reform school may have escaped the old noggin. So, you may want to tape a piece of tracing paper on to the computer screen and copy this handy guide.

Quality writing is made up of words, sentences and paragraphs which are all the same thing only some are a bunch of the others strung together. In between those things are little marks called "punctuations". These include a "period" which is a little dot like this . This means the words in that particular bunch are done saying whatever it is they were saying. Such as "The hockey game lasted a period of three periods. Period." You may also find useful punctuations like the "comma"(,) which means there's a pause in the words and you have time to go grab a beer out of the fridge, a "question mark" which means you don't know something, an "exclamation point" (!) which means you're shouting, and an asterisk (*) which means there's a spider on your paper. There's other ones, like quotaters and apostrifiers, but I'm not sure what they're for.

Words are things that can be very useful as you write, and lucky for you there are lots of kinds of words to use, and that you should become familiar with. One important kind of word is a "noun". A noun means anything you can see, touch, bounce, spray paint on or make a sandwich out of. Nouns are clearly very useful things to use in your writing. Some nouns you may want to use in your Irish Fest contest entry are shamrock, leprechaun, island, cow, egg beater, nostril and shamrock. Stick an s on the end of any of those to mean more than one of them. This is called a "plurality". Other handy words are "verbs" which means things you do, "adjectives" which are used to describe what stuff looks like, "adverbs" which tell how fast or slow you do stuff and "advertisements" which tell you what to buy. Throw lots of these various types of words around liberally to give your writing "pizazz" and "zip", which are incidentally "adjectives". Or maybe "adverbs". One of those, I think.

So now that you have the basic tools of writing, let's try a sample sentence. A sentence of course being a bunch of words strung together. Which of these do you think is quality writing?

A. Ireland is a green colored island with shamrocks on it and some people think there's leprechauns in the shamrocks.

B. Ireland!!! It is green, green as can be!! With pizazzy shamrocks and zippy leprechauns!!! Egg beaters, too, probably!!!!

See how much better that second one is, simply because it uses the basic tools I've laid out for you? With this information and the other tips I gave you earlier, you are now ready to get started on your winning entry in the Kansas City Irish Fest writing contest. Remember, writing entries must be received by August 22nd! As far as the baking, knitting and photography, you're on your own. I can't do any of those.