ACE Writing Skills: Your Real-Life Fairy Tale

Have you ever seen the following disclaimer at the beginning of a work of fiction? This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The reason is simple: Many authors derive stories from their own lives and fictionalize the events, people, and places. Then, they write a disclaimer to throw off the people who might read their work and see themselves or someone they know or who could identify familiar places in the book.

Get ready to tell a story from your life. It can be about anything:

• a special birthday celebration
• the time you received a gift you really wanted
• how and when you met your best friend
• discovering you have a talent in something
• your first memory from your childhood
• the time a special relationship in your life ended and why
• a memorable vacation
• the time you had to move and leave your friends behind

For this exercise, you will need the microphone in your document-writing software. As you tell your story, you will also be dictating it through your microphone, which will result in your having a written version. You will need the written version for the next step of this exercise. We will turn off our Zoom microphones to avoid affecting the dictation of another's story.

Tips to record your story:

1. Close your eyes. If you watch the screen record while you talk, you will be tempted to interrupt the flow of your story by editing spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc.
2. This tip goes with tip #1. Do not edit until after you have finished recording.

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It's Time to Edit

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How to edit your work:

• Read your work out loud (preferably to the class).
• Check for active voice vs. passive voice. Choose the active voice for the majority of your work.
• Break up your work into paragraphs:
• Keep one idea to one paragraph.
• Start a new paragraph when someone speaks in your writing.
• Use Grammarly to check spelling and grammar.
• Let someone else read your work.

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JOIN A GAME

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JOIN A GAME