conventions Archives - Anastasia Suen

The Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy: Practical Tips for Staying Safe Online
by Violet Blue (Author)

Booktalk: The whirlwind of social media, online dating, and mobile apps can make life a dream—or a nightmare. For every trustworthy website, there are countless jerks, bullies, and scam artists who want to harvest your personal information for their own purposes. But you can fight back, right now.

Award-winning author and investigative journalist Violet Blue shows you how women are targeted online and how to keep yourself safe. Blue’s practical, user-friendly advice will teach you how to:

* Delete personal content from websites
* Use website and browser privacy controls effectively
* Recover from and prevent identity theft
* Figure out where the law protects you–and where it doesn’t
* Set up safe online profiles
* Remove yourself from people-finder websites

Even if your privacy has already been compromised, don’t panic. It’s not too late to take control.

Snippet:

RECOVERING FROM HARASSMENT

Telling a victim “You shouldn’t have done it,” or “What did you expect?” is pointless, unfair, stupid, and just plain wrong. Instead of blaming and shaming, how about some information you can really use to help you make the decisions that are right for you? I’ll equip you with tools to mitigate, minimize, and even possibly avoid damage if something goes wrong.

Six Traits Mini Lesson

Trait: Conventions Ever wonder how to quote a sentence inside of another sentence? This excerpt shows you how. The first quoted sentence is written just like dialogue. After the opening quotation marks, the first word of the quoted sentence begins with a capital letter.

Telling a victim “You shouldn’t have done it,” or

The last word of the quoted sentence begins has punctuation before the closing opening quotation marks. The first quoted sentence ends with a comma, just like it would if the sentence was written as a stand alone line of dialogue.

The word or lets the reader know that more is coming…

or “What did you expect?” is

Just like the first quoted sentence, the first word of the second quote begins with a capital letter. It is the ending of the sentence that is different. The first sentence was a statement, so the period at end was changed to a comma when it was converted to dialogue.

The second quoted sentence was a question, so the ending punctuation remained the same. The end punctuation for a question is always a question mark. The closing opening quotation marks come after the question mark.

The word or lets the reader know that more is coming…

or “What did you expect?” is pointless, unfair, stupid, and just plain wrong.

The complete sentence also has end punctuation. This one ends with a period because it is a statement.

When this sentence is spoken aloud the pauses shown in the punctuation are auditory. The listener can hear the silence, the pauses, indicated here by the punctuation. On the written page, however, we use punctuation to add those pauses. All of this punctuation adds meaning and helps the reader understand what the writer is trying to convey.

It’s Nonfiction Monday!

The Legend of the Beaver’s Tail
by Stephanie Shaw (Author) and Gijsbert van Frankenhuyzen (Illustrator)

Booktalk: Long ago Beaver did not look like he does now. Yes, he had two very large front teeth, but his tail was not wide and flat. It was thick with silky fur and vain Beaver was inordinately proud of his glorious tail. (Based on an Ojibwe legend.)

Snippet:
“This tail is the tail to end all tails!” Beaver said to Deer. “I’ll bet you wish you had one like this.”

Deer said, “Beaver, it is a fine tail, but what I truly wish is for some tender grass for my family to eat.”

Six Traits Mini Lesson

Trait: Conventions Using dialogue adds more to the story–more insight into the characters and more punctuation! The dialogue itself is punctuated and the dialogue tags are punctuated, too.

The punctuation for the dialogue goes inside the quotation marks. The punctuation for the dialogue tag goes outside the quotation marks.

“This tail is the tail to end all tails!” Beaver said to Deer. “I’ll bet you wish you had one like this.”

When the dialogue tag comes before the dialogue, the punctuation for the dialogue tag is added before the quotation marks, too.

Deer said, “Beaver, it is a fine tail, but what I truly wish is for some tender grass for my family to eat.”

Wherever the punctuation goes, there is only a single space after it. (Double spacing after a sentence is a carryover from the days of the manual typewriter!)