young adult Archives - Page 98 of 99

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 Shadow of Seth
by Tom Llewellyn (Author)

Booktalk: Sixteen-year-old Seth Anomundy is a product of his environment: in this case, Tacoma, Washington, a working-class port city now undergoing urban renewal. Seth has grown up in Tacoma’s tough neighborhoods, where he’s perfectly at home in Choo-Choo’s boxing gym and Miss Irene’s soul food palace, the Shotgun Shack. With his mom working nights as a cleaner, Seth goes to high school, gets decent grades, and makes money where he can: filling in as cook at the Shotgun Shack, working as a sparring partner, and running errands for Nadel, the clock repairman. Life is hand-to-mouth, but okay–until he gets the news that his mother has been killed. The police don’t care about the death of just another drug addict, so a bewildered Seth takes it upon himself to find the killer. On a clock delivery run, he meets a beautiful rich girl named Azura Lear, who encourages Seth and tries to help track down the killer. But instead of finding answers, Seth finds only trouble. He faces down a gang of baseball-bat-wielding high school jocks and deals with the contempt of Azura’s suspicious father. And then there’s King George–a teenage thug Seth has previously managed to avoid–who has for some reason let it be known that he wants Seth dead. Right now.

Snippet: Nadel called my cell phone just as I got home from school, asking if I could make a pickup. Mom was sleeping. She wouldn’t need her car until she left for work, after dinner. I took her car keys and drove her Jeep over to Nadel’s House of Clocks.

Six Traits Mini Lesson

Traits: Sentence Fluency This young adult mystery begins with a four sentence paragraph. As the curtain opens on this story, we meet the main character and see his life on the stage. His life may be bumpy, but the sentences are not.

In the first sentence of the book, the main character is given a task to perform. Showing us that task also establishes the when and the where of the story setting.

Nadel called my cell phone just as I got home from school, asking if I could make a pickup.

The next sentence adds more details with just three words.

Mom was sleeping.

The third sentence builds on the second sentence by adding more details. We find out why the second sentence was important.

She wouldn’t need her car until she left for work, after dinner.

The two middle sentences let us know the factors the main character considered as he made his decision. In the final sentence of this opening paragraph, the main character has made his decision. He is on the move.

I took her car keys and drove her Jeep over to Nadel’s House of Clocks.

Every word counts. Each word in these four sentences adds a specific detail that readers need to know.