Lori D thank you for the encouragement! To everyone, yes, I shared that I am going back to school and some of the conclusions that I came to after reading some of the books being discussed in this thread. But those decisions that I came to for myself are tightly intertwined with my beliefs about writing instruction in general. For the past few DECADES I have been simultaneously working on my own writing and doing my best to share what I have learned with the people that had no one better to help them. For the past two decades, I have been rating my progress and that of any students by the general standards being discussed at this forum, rather than the standards that I used before TWTM was published. Even while at college, this forum had more impact on what I thought about writing than what my professors said about writing. I asked what is "good" writing. Some people repeated the exact things I have read innumerable times over the decades. Some people suggested some new ideas that I had never seen discussed before. Those new-to-me ideas probably were already being discussed, but I probably ignored them, because I was still so convinced that there was only one "right" way to write. Thank you to everyone that posted. Diversity of opinions is important. The world is a big place. "Good" is a big word. I learned what I needed to learn from this thread and I think some other people did too.

Yes, all of Dickens is in the Pubic Domain. I am overdue to reread Great Expectations.

This book is laugh-out-loud funny!

I am completing week 1 of the Artist's Way. Please, don't anyone be offended at what I am about to say! The assignment was to identify the sources that have made us doubt our ability to create art. I realized that certain people at this forum were at the top of my list, and that SHOCKED me. And then I remembered another person that posted here for years that said something similar when they left. I was homeschooling for years before TWTM was written and this forum was started. For decades now, I have been learning more and more, yet doubting myself more and more. For a time I thought that was good. It is not. All systems need diversity and redundancy. We need more people to write and paint and sing and add their voices to the conversation. It is never good when people are silenced and excluded from entering the conversation. My life is still in shambles from this move and I am still couch-hopping and officially homeless and I have lost my food stamps from my old state and cannot apply indefinitely in my new state until someone figures out how to clear some red tape. But on Wednesday, a social worker and one of my old professors are meeting with financial aid and everyone is going to try and figure out to finance me starting a creative writing major in September. I know I am a mess. I am going to write anyway. I am going to write the best I can now. I am going to stop waiting to earn my right to write. I am going to stop obsessing over each detail and start saying what I have to say, even if I do it "wrong". The Artist's Way says audacity is more important than talent. The Artist's Way also says the audacious will be most harshly reviewed by people with more talent and less audacity. I am starting to believe that we folk people need to make folk art, not just for our fellow folk, but to add our voice to greater general conversation. Time and time again, entire ecosystems are badly damaged because someone tries to rid the ecosystem of a "pest" or "weed". I might be a pest and a weed, but I think I am needed. I am going to throw myself out there. No more majors that allow me to write, but are not focused on writing. The Artist's Way has lots to say about "Shadow Artists". I am done hiding in the shadows. I am going to declare my intent to BE a writer. And if the school and the government and the charities want to help me write, then I will accept their help. My time in that filthy scary desert was not wasted. It served the same function as living in a monastery. I left that slum a different person than the one that entered it. I am ready for this.

Sorry I took so long to get back to this thread. I moved across the country this week, and the first few days had to be devoted to long overdue medical and dental care as well as normal moving tasks. This was an eventful move, but I am safe and that is all that matters. Thank you to everyone that contributed. Rosie, thank you for that link! Critterfixer, I read some of Craft in the Real World before I left. So far that book is excellent. Thanks! It is validating to know that other authors have already written about this topic, and have had some of the same questions as me, and already came to the conclusions that I have been leaning towards.

Thank you so much for telling your story and for the book recommendation. I can borrow Craft in the Real World from bookshare.org for free.

Links to the East African Guides https://overinthemeadow.wordpress.com/free-waldorf-guides/ Free Waldorf eBooks https://www.waldorflibrary.org/books/3/showCategory/52/ebooks I like some of this author's older stuff, but I have no idea what has happened over the years. Her OLD planning videos at Youtube are really good.

I homeschooled my younger child from 5th grade until college, but my older child finished 5th grade in public school and was in a new charter school for 6th and 7th. I pulled him from the charter school for 8th grade with the intention of sending him to the local high school for 9th grade. My oldest did not want me to teach him, and wanted a secular correspondence school. We enrolled him in American School for a GENERAL Diploma which he was academically prepared for, and wrote "N/A Homeschooled" when the application required proof of 8th grade graduation. In reality I lied and he just skipped 8th grade. By spring of what would have been his 8th grade year, he started the equivalent of the 10th grade and had a job. We decided not to enroll him in the local high school after all. He finished high school two years early, despite working more than studying. He started putting himself through college at 16 years old. He graduated with his AS in Business just after his 19th birthday with no students debt and a small nest egg of savings and joined some friends on the other side of the country. He did not get a classical education, but he did things his way, and I have no regrets at all. I don't know what would have happened if he did a traditional 8th grade year. It scares me to think about it. This boy needed to work. The type of work that makes boys sweat and bleed and cry. The type of work that turns boys into to men. We broke laws. We got away with it. This son called me on Mother's Day this year, and I cried in gratefulness that everything worked out as well as it did for him. We all made our mistakes, but it could have turned out SO SO SO much worse.

I am talking about many things. One of the things is fiction aimed at youth with an omniscient narrator. I have read many curricula that will not allow students to use an omniscient narrator. By most modern grammar textbooks, the punctuation is wrong. The sentences would sometimes qualify as run-ons. I could go on and on and on. It would be impossible to use most of this book as examples of correct usage if I used any of the popular writing curricula, even those curricula that include cherry picked sentences from classical literature and then instruct parents to have children copy more good literature. The Right to Write is a very good book. It is by the same author as The Artists Way. Julia Cameron is answering some of what I am asking, even in the first few chapters. This is a book that I plan to finish. Maybe what I am thinking about right now is the right way to write vs the right to write. That is not only a tongue twister, but it makes my head spin! LOL

I have a migraine. Last night I laid in the dark and finished my book by letting Alexa read it to me. The book is "outdated" and "wrong" and beautiful all the same. I can no longer accept that the majority of English literature is "wrong". If a students were to read these books and use them as a style guide, they would fail classes by rigid instructors. Something is wrong here. I think it is wrong to call so much wrong. What is my next step after coming to this conclusion? I do not know. To start, I think I am going to give myself more permission to write. The most successful abusers teach their victims to abuse themselves and to abuse others. I think I am done silencing myself and silencing others. In the 1960's, women burned their bras and girdles. My books are already gone as I make this move across the country, so I don't need to burn them.

I want to read this book. The Right to Write https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002JF1N2S/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

I just had another thought. Who is a worthy audience to write for? I have seen some works that were written for a marginalized population that were harshly judged as "wrong" by outsiders, when in fact that they had been received as correct by their intended audience. Are marginalized audiences disqualified from assigning credibility to a work? What does this idea have in common with the question about a tree that falls in a place where no one hears it fall? Does it make a sound? Can a work that is only useful to a niche market of marginalized people be "good".

Marketing: lots to think about with that.

I am realizing that "easily readable" is not a synonym for "correct" or "good". I am not sure where I am going with that, but it just struck me now.

Folk painting is often out of proportion and almost never uses perspective properly. But the painters had something worth painting and they did. Now. They did not wait until they earned the right to paint. They did not sacrifice other things to make the time to study the rules set by a culture that excluded them and sometimes even exploited them. They just painted. Without permission.

What is happening to the preemie babies of low-income and teen moms who are at extra risk of having preemie babies, and don't have friends that can devote hours to search for formula hours away? If we choose to allow this to continue, what kind of people are we, and what else are we doing that is equally neglectful but not in the news because it is not yet impacting the people that do have friends that can drive hours away to help them? This is the tip if the iceberg, I fear.

In order to properly write, Maya Angelou would have a rented hotel room in whichever city she was living in. She would arrive in the early hours of the morning, lie on the bed and begin to read. Maybe the Psalms, maybe James Weldon Johnson, something, as she once said, to remember how beautiful and pliable the language is. My own Psalms and James Weldon Johnson is Singin’ Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry like Christmas It has inherited timelessness through a life lived for language and storytelling, and I am in love with it. I think READING more is what is making me question my previous conclusions about writing. As a child I had little explicit instruction, but I read widely. I am realizing now that I read so widely that it was impossible to develop a tight set of conclusions about how I should write. And even the little explicit instruction was contradictory as I changed schools so many times that were in different countries and economic brackets. Less and less do I think my education was deficient. More and more I am learning to appreciate the privilege of such a literature rich curriculum. It was not planned by anyone but God. My Father lovingly strewed the books he wanted me to read to become who he wanted me to be. During my time of lack of faith, I believed that I had suffered neglect of a "proper" secular education, and wondered who I would have become if I'd had the privilege. I tried to make up for what I lacked. Now I think I need to undue some of what I adopted in that time. I am reading books that are good. I know they are good. In their time they were called good. Now they are mocked and called "wrong" because they are not the same as the new books. Yes, reading more and reading wider is reintroducing me to "how beautiful and pliable the language is." I don't want to ignore and disregard all this beauty. I feel like a child growing up in a trilingual household with more choices. Rosie, you told me about a book that used "they" as a singular pronoun. At the time, I chose not to read the book because I was too tired at the time to bother with extra frustration to translate the pronouns in my head. A book I am reading now is a bit of a struggle, but I want it just the way that it is. I am glad these books exist, even the ones I don't want to read right now. I think I want to read more. I think I want to give myself more permission to play with English.

Useful Self-taught Innovative Inclusive definition of "Good". I have to go do something, but I am dwelling on this list while I do it.

I just added, "What is 'Good'?" to the title of this thread.

I am rethinking what is "good". I have seen so many different versions of good, and few of them are explicitly taught unless they are taught as something NOT to do. I know what the writing curricula teach. I am not sure I believe them. Too often they contradict what I see in real life, or focus on minutiae that cloud the big picture, or just require too much of everything: time, money, storage space, etc. As I am writing this, I realize that first, I need to decide what *I* believe is "good". Thanks everyone, This is helping. What do I think is good and why? That has changed for me over the years. A LOT.

Personally, I am not unfamiliar with the major methods and popular curricula that are used by homeschoolers and public schools to teach writing. I have spent a lot of time and money using some of them, and homemade materials as well. Thank you everyone that is taking the time to make long posts of lists and links. I am the OP, but I am not the only one that is reading this thread now, and who knows who will find this thread 10 years from now. I am questioning the lists themselves. I believe the "Four Types of Writing" lists are fairly modern and were first adopted by American schools with lots of immigrant children? The Four Types writing curricula replaced the Progym? I thought templates would be easier to teach and easier for students to complete. It didn't go as I expected. Then I went back to college and had the tables turned on me and was expected to write from a template myself. My first essay in Freshman English set me up to only be able to hold up a racist prick as an authority and I drove myself crazy trying to obey the written instructions and not do that. I did not want my name attached to something I did not believe. The other students were just LOST and kept asking the professor for more instruction, but the more the professor tried to "help", the tighter he made the requirements, and the more impossible for a class full of poor and brown students to say anything authentic. The most lost students had it the best. They just free wrote in Ebonics as if the assigned topic was a journaling prompt, and wondered what the others were literally crying over. They wrote from their hearts. They said something worthy of listening to. The more the professor ranted, the more they smiled at the crazy white man. They did not believe him that his way of writing was THE way to write. They just dismissed him. Of course they barely passed the class, but they wrote something worthy to be read. I find the modern templates difficult to use with older and British literature that follow different rules. Teaching modern punctuation styles with copywork from older books is frustrating. Some of these lists and styles are newer than my favorite literature. There are curricula that combine the new and the old, and I am not impressed. The advertising is superior to the products. I learned more about persuasion techniques from studying the advertisements than the teachers' manuals. LOL. There are people reading this thread that have not already spend hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours on these checklists The lists are good for us to read for free. But are these lists THE way to write or the most important way to write? For everyone? Always? I am remembering my peers in my freshman English class, the people that I have tutored and my sons, and my own learning experiences in the USA and outside the USA. I am trying to make sense of all that I have seen and read and participated in.

Thanks! I did not know that!

This was definitely in the 1970s on a British colony island. So many Americans do not know what smallpox is, and think it is either measles or Chicken Pox. My sister was badly scarred. I have always known the dangers of smallpox, and have always been hyperalert to any discussion of the disease.

I have a sibling that was immunized for smallpox in the the 1970's. She developed a full blown case of whatever was in the vaccine. Does anyone know exactly what was in the vaccines then? Supposedly there is some immunity from these vaccines despite how long ago they were administered, but I am thinking she has even better immunity. I have not had any real contact with her for 16 years, but I am the only one left in the family that as any memory of what happened. She was a baby and younger than me. I was very young, but I still have some very clear memories. My dad had the car and told my mom he was working a shift at the fire station and when she called there, he was not there. One of the other men from the station came and picked her up in the ambulance and took her to the hospital himself. I am moving across the country in just a few days. I am in no rush to make now the time to reestablish contact. But I am thinking that she needs to know her medical history. I think she may have been told about this, but ... I think she just thought of it as another weird story from a period of her life that is only weird stories to her, and that it would never have application to her present life that she has worked so hard to make normal. Monkey Pox is concerning enough in general, but now I need to add this to my worries, along with moving. UGH!

I have not read much fan fiction. I read a little by one author many years ago, when her work popped up when I was googling if a third season was planned for a TV show. Thanks! I need to read some more before I can come to any conclusions on this topic.