How to Writelike ARCHIVED 210813

Snippets and highlighting

Introducing snippets

Writelike exercises are built around snippets. A snippet is a piece of text from an authentic source. 

They can be quite varied! Here's a short and simple snippet:

I had gone skiing once when I was eight. I remembered the ground hitting me again and again.

Teen Angst? Naaah... (2000)

And here's a longer, more complex snippet:

One of my earliest memories of drums came a little later than that, on Christmas Eve 1973. It’s probably my earliest memory in general, and it’s blurry around the edges, but I remember the center of it: waking up in bed that night and going downstairs to find a toy drum kit, a xylophone, a keyboard, and a toy guitar by the tree.

Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove(2013)

Highlighters

Writelike is all about learning to write by copying the techniques of other writers. One way we often do this is by highlighting useful patterns in a snippet so that you can see them.

You'll see the snippet below has a set of highlighters and a button that says Show Our Highlighting.

Try this:

  1. If you click Show Our Highlighting, you'll see the snippet text highlighted.
  2. Point your mouse at the highlights to see which is which (helpful if you're colourblind!).
  3. Notice that the button underneath now says Show Your Highlighting. That will make more sense in a moment. For now, click it to revert back to the blank snippet.

I had gone skiing once when I was eight. I remembered the ground hitting me again and again.

Teen Angst? Naaah... (2000)

You can also apply the highlighters yourself. This is useful if you are trying to figure out the pattern for yourself or you are debating the highlighting in a class.

Try this:

  1. Select a highlighter below and drag your cursor across some of the text inside the snippet. The text should be highlighted.
  2. Select another highlighter and highlight a different piece of text. You'll see you can apply each highlighter individually.
  3. Click Show Our Highlighting. You'll see our highlighting, all applied.
  4. Click Show Your Highlighting. You'll see your highlighting, unchanged. You can toggle between these views.
  5. Click on one of your highlights. The highlight should disappear—that's how you erase your own highlighting if you want to change something.

Try applying the highlighters yourself.

Note that you can’t apply highlighting across

paragraph breaks. You need to apply the highlight to each individual paragraph. (This often comes up in poetry snippets.)

You can tap a highlighted section to clear it. (Try that now.)

Note that we don’t save highlighting you apply to a snippet like this. We do save it when you highlight your own writing (which we’ll do below).

Writelike

Note that these highlighters are just a tool. You won't get any kind of score or automated feedback from using them. Their job is to help you check your own understanding and facilitate class discussion.

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