Anastasia Suen - Developmental Editor

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!

Stormy Night
by Salina Yoon (Author/Illustrator)

Booktalk: When thunder shakes his house and rain pounds the windows, Bear is frightened. But comforting his Mama, Papa, and Floppy helps make the storm seem not so scary. Before Bear knows it, the storm has passed, because even storms need their sleep . . . and so do bears.

Snippet: The wind was whirring, the trees were crackling, and the rain was pounding against the windows.

Six Traits Mini Lesson

Trait: Sentence Fluency Picture books for the preschool age don’t have very many words. As Bear looks out the window on this stormy night, this is the only sentence on this double-paged spread. Bear looks out his bedroom window on the verso (left) page of the spread. On the recto (right) page of the spread, the story text is seen on the outside of the house next to Bear’s window.

Notice the use of threes? The storm is shown in the art and in the words in three different ways.

The wind was whirring,

Young readers can see the wind blowing the trees outside Bear’s window. That’s the first ACTION. Every action leads to a REACTION, one that is shown in the second example:

the trees were crackling

The third example makes the storm complete:

and the rain was pounding against the windows.

TIP: The use of threes in storytelling is a oft-used Western tradition.

Three is considered the perfect number to use in fairy tales, advertising, and public speaking. (Most stories have also three acts!) A pair is not enough and four is a bit too much, but give three examples and the story feels complete.